Page 92 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

DOT.COM CRASH

. cultural citizenship (paradoxically corresponding with the era of
mass media such as television) involved the winning of cultural
freedoms (identity rights);
. DIY citizenship (to date) DIY rights allowed for the freedom to
choose affiliations.

Phase 5 was DIY culture. Instead of accepting their role as passive media
audiences or consumers, people could form or join taste constituencies
or communities of affiliation and produce their own culture.
See also: Cultural citizenship, Culture jamming, Democratainment

DOT.COM CRASH

In May 2000, the world witnessed a major crash in Internet stock
prices (see nasdaq). The biggest casualties were the ‘dot.coms’: e-
businesses trading on web addresses. Despite the popular mythologis-
ing of Internet entrepreneurs as inexperienced graduates, blame
cannot be cast completely on the dot.com workers themselves. There
was substantial intellectual capital in many of the failed businesses. As
Mills (2001) writes: ‘the share prices collapsed simply because they had
been bid up to irrational and unsustainable levels’. Venture capitalists
in particular had leapt to provide start-up dot.coms with sometimes
astoundingly large sums of money, placing unreasonable expectations
on newfirms in a new industry to get it right first time. Investors
expected to reap fast returns, unfazed by the fact that fewdot.coms
could claim to be making a profit. In other words, the new, weightless
economy was too lightly entered into.
At the same time, the Federal Reserve was creating an excess of
money in order to cope with the expected devastation of Y2K. In the
subsequent anticlimax, excess money was poured into the dot.com
sector by Wall Street brokers. When the Federal Reserve decided that
monetary tightening was needed, the dot.coms were the major
casualties. Commentators in the pages of business journals competed
to devise the slickest epitaph for the once hip industry. The ‘dot.com
crash’, became the ‘dot.bomb’, the ‘dot.dumb’ and the ‘tech wreck’.
The abbreviation ‘b2c’, as in business-to-consumer, became the
Silicon Valley’s term for ‘back to Cleveland’ (Fischer, 2001).
Afterwards, it was repeatedly stated that ‘the crash was a good thing’
(Gimein and Diba, 2001). The new economy did not die and history
remained on its side. The expansion of railways in the 1850s, and of

77