Page 131 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

110 Critical investigations in political economy

challenges and threats as well as opportunities. The 1990s critique of corporate
dominance seems to many to have underestimated at least two major developments:
the expansion of social media and what Castells calls ‘mass self-communication’,
and the extent of the crisis for traditional media businesses.
To a large extent the rival claims can be viewed historically, as some of the
utopianism that greeted the emergence of the Internet has been answered and
modified by criticism of the way the net developed. After the dot-com crash of
2001–2, the belief that Internet technology had transformed the very nature of
capitalism was replaced, for a time, by more sober assessment (Mosco 2005).
The mainstreaming of the Internet as a tool for business shifted debate to ‘real’
economy issues – how businesses, like news content creators, audiovisual producers
or the music industry, can survive and make money. During the same period, a
welcome, parallel shift in academic work brought more empirical investigation of
the Internet (Livingstone 2010). Yet, however modified and attenuated, the key
debates of the 1990s still matter. They continue to influence contemporary dis-
cussions and policy, and help us assess claims against actual developments. It is
conventional to treat some of the exuberant 1990s claims as historical curiosities,
yet it is also conventional to argue that such claims are being realised in more
sober, modified form (Küng et al. 2008).
A central mid 1990s claim was that the Internet would break the control and
dominance of media conglomerates. In doing so it would help remedy a range of
information problems, reinvigorate and extend the public sphere and replace
information control and scarcity with communication abundance. Importantly
this vision engaged with and ‘resolved’ problems of existing media power, while
tending to promote deregulation of existing controls on public media. The
Internet would enable a massive expansion of content to be produced and circu-
lated by dramatically reducing the costs and barriers to publication. As distribution
costs fell to zero and as distribution overcame barriers imposed by space (such as
physical distribution) and time, the Internet would allow multimodal commu-
nication exchanges that overcame the limitations of the ‘mass media’ model of
unidirectional, one-to-many communication. Old media like television would be
replaced (Gilder 1994). For writers such as Nicholas Negroponte (1995), Mark
Poster (1997) and others the claim is also based on the disintermediated nature of the
Internet – as providing unfettered access for open and rapid exchange of opinion
between individuals, without mediators such as the editors and journalists that
select and shape content for publication. While the push and publishing model
of the 1990s web did not fully realise such claims, Web 2.0 theorists in the 2000s
argued that the spread of horizontal communications and the polycentric nature of
the Internet was shrinking the space occupied by gatekeepers and intermediaries.
Allied to belief in the accessibility of the Internet was the notion of abundance –
any idea (and any good) could find its market in the emerging digital economy. One
consequence of this emancipatory account is that the Internet (together with
other digital media) undermines a traditional, scarcity rationale for communications
regulation. Gilder (1994) argued that the Internet would eliminate long-standing