Page 135 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

114 Critical investigations in political economy

resource control, exploitation and domination. This links to another broad
theme: the relationship between communications and democracy. The potential of
information and communication technologies (ICTs) to facilitate ‘strong democracy’,
participative democracy where people are fully involved in decision-making on all
issues which affect them or are important to them, must be seriously questioned
wherever people are denied access on the basis of economic status, gender,
geographic location, or language. CPE scholars have been particularly engaged
in shifting from a narrow focus on technological access to consider wider barriers
to power and decision-making.
Against tendencies to posit the Internet as a year zero, a rupture that is
radically discontinuous with what has gone before, CPE scholars emphasise the
need to consider carefully the co-presence of old and new, continuities with
discontinuities.
Murdock (2004: 20) argues that to fully understand the Internet and digitalisation
we must ground analysis in ‘the transformations currently taking place in the
organization of capitalism and the contradictions it is generating’. Schiller (2007)
describes a shift towards ‘informationalized capitalism’, whereby ‘political and
economic elites assigned mounting strategic importance to information beginning
around 1970’ (2007: xiv). The impetus for information and communication
growth came from the ‘systemic crisis’ in Western capitalism in the 1970s, with
information commodities becoming the prime site for capitalist expansion, a key
growth area to redress the stagnation in profits elsewhere, notably in parts of
Western manufacturing.

Internet history

Making sense of claims and understanding the relationship between the Internet
and mass media is best done through an historical perspective. Many excellent
accounts are available (see Curran et al. 2012: 34–65; McChesney 2013: 96–129)
and so my aim here is to highlight only certain aspects relevant to the discussion
of media below. First, from its origins in the US government-funded work of the
US military in developing a university-based research network, ARPANET, in
1969, Internet history has been shaped by a diverse mix of actors who interacted
and often struggled to extend their modes of operation and influence (Curran
and Seaton 2010). In its early formation these included the US government and
military; businesses (initially mainly in science, computing and telecommunications);
academics and scientists; a counter-cultural influence of (mainly US) students
and graduates (what Barbrook and Cameron (1995) call the ‘Californian ideo-
logy’); and hackers, key advocates of the open architecture of the Internet
(MacKinnon 2012). The commercialisation of the Internet in the early 1990s
was resisted by some actors, notably from within the counter-cultural and liber-
tarian anarchist-influenced communities that had rapidly populated ‘cyberspace’,
but also within the scientific and academic non-profit culture of the National
Science Foundation Network (NSFNet), which prohibited commercial uses until