Page 133 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

112 Critical investigations in political economy

expressions of hopes and desires. ‘What made the dotcom boom a myth was not that
it was false but that it was alive, sustained by the collective belief that cyberspace
was opening a new world by transcending what we once knew about time, space,
and economics’ (Mosco 2005: 4). Changes of media and technologies have his-
torically been connected to the emergence of certain one-sided techno-optimistic
and techno-pessimistic myths. Many academics, then, would agree with Sonia
Livingstone (2010) that such accounts have been limited and limiting. Such
dissatisfaction informed shifts towards more empirically based research and
analysis, in place of rampant punditry (Curran et al. 2012; Fuchs 2008, 2011;
McChesney 2013).
Much early writing on the Internet has been replete with what John Dovey
(1996: xiii) calls the ‘utopian rhetoric of technological determinism’, the notion that
radical change arises from technology, that the direction of change is pre-
determined by an inner technical dynamic, and that the technology has necessary
and determinate ‘impacts’ on social life. Technological determinism suffused the
punditry and policy discourses of Western politicians, to the chagrin of social
scientists who had successfully established the social shaping of technology as a
governing academic account. In fact, Internet scholarship has advanced more
sophisticated, dialectical and blended approaches. The work of CPE scholars
such as Mansell (2004) shifts from either technological or social determinism in
favour of examining how the Internet enables certain social possibilities and
impedes others (Livingstone 2010: 125–26).
The major flaw in claims for the transformative potential of the Internet is
that they were ‘inferences derived from the Internet’s technology’ (Curran 2012: 3).
Such techno-Internet-centrism also tended to obscure a key insight from political
economy, that the wider external context affects the Internet’s impact: that
capitalism influenced the Internet more than vice versa (Curran et al. 2012;
McChesney 2013).
CPE scholars have been especially engaged with issues of access, inequality
and digital divides (van Dijk 2005), examining uneven patterns of access and use
of communication technologies over the geopolitical levels of international,
national, regional, and domestic households. Tracing the relationship between
information inequality and other socio-economic and cultural inequalities,
researchers have examined how gender, age, class, education and socio-economic
resources stratify online access and use, and the implications this has for the
distribution of other resources.
A criticism of early 1990s claims of digital abundance was that they functioned
as compensatory fantasies, projecting onto technology the capacity to overcome
deep-rooted social and economic problems, extrapolating from the experience of
an affluent, North American subjectivity. Yet the exponential growth of the
Internet has continued to generate complex patterns of diffusion and exclusion.
By 2013, only around one-third of the world’s population had Internet access,
yet the Internet had grown from its ‘English speaking’ roots in North America’s
scientific community to become a global network, growing from an estimated