Page 45 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

CODE

Localisation and industry clusters are proliferating in what US
federal banker Alan Greenspan described as the ‘weightless’ new
economy (see intangibles). No longer are the rawmaterials of a
Newcastle essential for cluster formation. The miniature (practically
weightless) microchip, creativity, information, research, talent and
networks have replaced coal or steel, manual labour and machinery as
components of the majority of clusters.
In 1939 two Stanford University students started an electronic
measuring device company out of a car garage in Palo Alto, California.
By 1999 their company, Hewlett-Packard, was one in a cluster within
the area, nowcalled Silicon Valley, that had a combined revenue of
US$47.1 billion. A large number of the companies that make personal
computers, circuits, software, 3D graphics and that pioneered Internet
search engine technology can be found in Silicon Valley. It is also the
home of Stanford University, which educates people to become
researchers and workers. It is ‘an entire environment, or habitat honed
for innovation and entrepreneurship’ (Lee et al., 2000: 1).
Cluster research has expanded and challenged previous economic
theories. Newfindings on the importance of cooperative relationships
between research, private industry and third-sector organisations are
arising out of cluster research. Although primarily an economic
concept, clusters are focusing attention back on place, lifestyle,
localism and community. The assumption that ‘nations are the salient
entities for understanding the structure of economic life’ (Jacobs,
1984: 30) is being disproved at a macro level through globalisation and
at the micro level through clusters.

See also: Creative industries, Globalisation, Localisation

CODE

Tacit or underlying rules of combination of recognised elements in any
communicationsystem,fromlanguagetocomputercode.Codeisaterm
originating incommunicationscience,which over theyearsdividedinto
areas that had little to do with each other (see art–science interface).
Sciences based on ‘code’ include mathematical and computer sciences,
e.g. programming, signal processing and cryptography; communication
science as applied to telecommunications, etc.; and biotechnology, in
which genetic codes have become a major international focus.
The work of US information theorists led to the idea that
communication was a mechanical transfer process and that code was

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