Page 132 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Political economy of the Internet 111

concerns about media concentration and obviate the need for policy-making.
According to Negroponte (1995: 57) ‘Guaranteed plurality might require less
legislation than one would expect because the monolithic empires of mass media
are dissolving into an array of cottage industries’. Regulation of media services
and media ownership would become increasingly unnecessary in an expanding
digital market. Alongside market-liberal visions of abundance, other accounts
hoped for an enrichment of citizenship and civil engagement that drew upon
disillusionment and disquiet about existing media systems’ provision, as well as
intractable problems of advanced societies, from the social atomisation of ‘bowling
alone’ (Putnam 2001), to plunging levels of political engagement and representation.
For Rheingold (1993) electronic communities pose a fundamental challenge to
the existing political hierarchy’s monopoly over communications and provide the
basis on which to revitalise citizen-based democracy.
Claims made for changes in media and communications relate to broader claims
that the Internet provides a dynamic open environment which favours innovative
network operations that bring together supply and demand, so that forms of (rela-
tively) more perfect competition can be realised. The advantages that favoured
monopolists in the old economy now favour nimble, networked enterprises,
‘start-ups’ and SME market entrants. The evidence of new concentrations of
market power in e-commerce enterprises might be expected to engender caution
but these firms are often celebrated as innovators writ-large. Google has been
described as ‘the first post-media company’ (Jarvis 2009: 4), whose key to success
is openness, focusing on linking rather than owning (Tapscott and Williams
2006: 134). This portrayal is testament to digital myths and successful PR more
than the reality of a company that owns a growing mass of server farms for Big Data.
According to Leadbeater (2009: xix) the mass media ‘boulders’ of the pre-digital
age ‘have been drowned by a rising tide of pebbles’ in a new ‘organisational
landscape’ in which new media companies such as Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube
organise and aggregate individual pebbles. The Internet, through its expanding
array of nodes, favours horizontal peer-to-peer exchanges over mass media’s
top-down modes of address and demonstrates an ‘underlying culture of sharing,
decentralization and democracy’ (Leadbeater 2009: 7).

Critical arguments and analysis
The broader claims of techno-utopianism were challenged on grounds of mis-
diagnosis through technological determinism, evasion of problems of accessibility
(digital divides) and failure to appreciate how dominant political and economic
forces would act to shape what appeared to be an inherently ungovernable
environment. As media historians are obliged to reiterate, across the history of
communications technical innovations have been accompanied by claims that
they will bring about (or accelerate) radical social change. In an interesting
engagement with digital myths, Mosco argues that in addition to recognising and
unmasking the lies contained within them, it is productive to appreciate myths as