Page 140 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

INTERPELLATION

privacy, certification and security, influence the availability of
information on the web. ‘Portals’ – the points at which you begin
to navigate yourself through the web (offering features such as search
engines, databases, e-mail and news) have techniques to encourage, if
not direct, users to where they want to go. AOL’s walled garden
strategy successfully directs their customers to remain within the AOL
confines for 85 per cent of their Internet usage.
However, as the history of the Internet indicates, commercial
involvement can stimulate innovation, access and diversity. Leiner et al.
(2000) outline in their account of the evolution of the Internet how
commercial vendors worked with researchers to develop interoperable
standards. Further, BNN, AT&T and IBM – all private companies –
were involved in the early phases in protocol and infrastructure
innovation and construction. And although communication and
innovation have been administered by decentralised techniques,
hierarchies have always existed in terms of who has access to the
knowledge, equipment – and hence the forums – of the Internet. The
Internet has existed as a result of a fusion of the public and private
sectors, volunteers and workers, regulation and dissent.
By 2020, it is estimated that Chinese will be the most common
language on the Internet.
See also: Cyberdemocracy, Digital/analogue distribution, Digital
divide
Further reading: Lessig (1999)

INTERPELLATION

A term from the writings of the French Marxist political philosopher
Louis Althusser, referring to what he takes to be the process by which
ideology ‘hails’ individuals as its subject. Sometimes translated as
‘appellation’.
Individuals are said to be interpellated by the discursive, linguistic,
symbolic order in which they live. Thus, for Althusserians, ideology is
general and inescapable, as well as being a material product of
ideological state apparatuses. Interpellation is the very mechanism by
which people are subjected to ideology, and it is usually understood as
a textual operation of ‘audience positioning’.
Both the notion of interpellation and that of ‘ideology in general’
have been criticised since the early 1970s, when they were most
influential, as being too essentialist and abstract. If interpellation is

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