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1 The New Ecology
In 1983, the American media company Knight Ridder, in conjunction with AT&T, launched an online news service called Viewtron. Initially a “videotex” service (similar to Ceefax, launched by the BBC in 1974), Viewtron initially required a specialised terminal but very quickly moved to being available on home computers. Launched in Florida first, Knight Ridder began its news service offering The Miami Herald online (the company itself was based at that time on the top floor of the Miami Herald building), requiring subscribers to pay $600 for a terminal and, according to company director Morton Goldstrom, offering “all the information I can imagine when I want it, the 21st century genie”1 Knight Ridder’s original plans were to sign up 5,000 customers to the system: in addition to purchasing the terminal, subscribers would pay $12 per month to Viewtron and then $1 per hour to Southern Bell for access to the system. All the information that Morton Goldstrom could imagine came at a significant price, but once Viewtron had jettisoned its specialist terminals, the service managed to extend to some 15 states before being closed in 1986: the service was extremely slow and people ceased to use the system once the novelty wore off. As subscribers departed the service, Knight Ridder lost approximately $50 million and James Batton, then president of the company, observed: “Videotex is not likely to be a threat to newspapers in the foreseeable future.”2
Viewtron was an experiment a decade ahead of its time, and demonstrates just how important it is that technology is viewed within a wider context of financial and social operations. A recurrent theme among Knight Ridder executives was that subscribers were not incorporating videotex news into their daily habits: as well as the connecting technology being slow and frustrating, users still relied on television, radio, and print for their daily consumption of the news. The entire ecosystem that would support an online publication did not exist. By the late 1980s, Internet service providers such as Compuserve, America Online (later AOL), and Prodigy were beginning to offer news services as part of their package, but it was not until the wider adoption of Tim Berners Lee’s world wide web in the mid-1990s that news services really began to take off. The first pioneers included CNN, The Chicago Tribune, and Time Inc’s Pathfinder website. Before this, there existed a specialist series of “fax papers”, which had a limited period to gain a foothold in the market before the web removed their reason for existence. Aimed at specialist (usually business) audiences, fax papers took advantage of the proliferation of fax machines in the late 1980s to send news highlights to subscribers for prices ranging from $400 per year (the cost of Tribfax, a product of the Chicago Tribune) to $2,500 for the one-page fax paper sent out daily by the Hartford Courant.3 This hybrid of print and digital cultures was doomed to failure as soon as general-purpose computers with Internet connections replaced the fax machines, as well as American news sites web pages for international services such as the Electronic Telegraph (1994) and BBC (1997) in the UK began to appear, although the Anglo-American dominance of the web meant that sites in other countries only emerged more slowly: indeed, France’s own national videotex service – Minitel – was incredibly successful after its introduction in 1982, with 26 per cent of French homes having access to a Minitel terminal in 1993 (bringing in revenues of $1.3 billion) compared to 13 per cent with a PC and 11 per cent with cable access.4
By the early 2000s, online news services were becoming ubiquitous across many parts of the globe, although the grip of news websites was felt most keenly in the English-speaking world. In 1999, John Pavlik was predicting that news junkies had “never had it so good” with news available at the touch of a button,5 but as the new millennium began plenty of legacy media companies, such as ABC, were still very tentative when it came to rolling out truly multimedia programming6: at that stage, connections were still not fast enough and there were still too few users online to justify a wholesale shift online. By 2007, when Apple unveiled the first iPhone, faster Internet and mobile connections and eventually cheaper devices allowed the number of connected users to explode: while online news at the end of the twentieth century had been a novelty, by the beginning of the second decade it had become the norm, with consequences that completely transformed the relationships between news sites and readers. In its annual Digital News Report for 2018, for example, Reuters reported that social media – the prime driver of news consumption growth for much of the previous decade – had finally begun to decline in the face of mistrust surrounding fake news; yet in many countries, it remained the primary source of information for many users.7 Television and radio remain a significant part of the mix for our consumption of news, but the rapid decline of print in the past ten to fifteen years means that for many of us, our mobile devices are the primary means by which we discover what is taking place around us.
Digital Ecosystems, Media Ecologies, and Technological Determinism
“Digital ecosystem” has become something of a buzzword in recent years. The business research organisation, Gartner, for example, offers its services to support organisations that wish to use “digital business ecosystems & the platform economy” to gain the “leverage organizations need to monetize, manage, and measure information as an asset for competitive advantage”.8 Beyond such trite phrases, in the field of information management the notion of digital ecosystems provides important tools for setting up the architecture required to sustain technological innovations in cloud computing and the Internet of things, as discussed by Skilton and Brady among others.9 Between 2007 and 2013, the concept of a digital business ecosystem formed an important part of the work of the IEEE Digital EcoSystems and Technologies Conference (IEEE DEST), covering a wide array of issues including sustainable infrastructure for businesses, healthcare, and the digital humanities.10 Nigel Shadbolt, alongside other researchers, has argued that artificial intelligence is contributing to a rise of social machines, in which the persistent environment of mobile and wearable technology, as well as sensors, is increasingly orchestrating human interactions and leading to the emergence of what he calls “social computational power”.11 Shadbolt offers Wikipedia as an example of such social computational power at work, whereby the activity of thousands of volunteers across the globe is co-ordinated not by human agents in traditional terms (editors with a sole prerogative over gatekeeping), but rather the interaction of those people via the software platform itself. Likewise, within the field of digital humanities, theorists such as Sheila Anderson and Tobias Blanke have demonstrated some of the ways in which big data and high-performance computing can transform scholarship in the field by transferring some of the characteristics of e-Science to arts and humanities research. Drawing on the ideas of Thomas Hughes regarding complex systems – in which interacting, interconnected large technology systems can grow from relatively simple components – such an approach may be even more important as an increasing amount of content is commodified behind paywalls: more than ever, scholars in the field must explore and open up the connections between such large technology systems as business seeks to compartmentalise them.12
This tension between large technology systems that enable the kind of social computational power discussed by Shadbolt and proprietary, more restrictive ones are very much at play in the confrontations between the Big Five. Although more recently some of these players have begun to recognise the opportunities present in embracing open digital ecosystems – typically because of a failure to monopolise important sectors, as in the case of Microsoft which sought to make its Office software available on as many platforms as possible when its Windows Mobile operating system collapsed – the more prevalent tendency of the past ten years has been to lock users into proprietary systems. The most successful company in this regard is Apple which, in terms of mobile considered from the vantage of profitability, is far ahead of the competition. Yet even the much-vaunted openness of Google’s Android platform still seeks to establish other Google services such as search and maps as primary for users, while Amazon is ruthless in its attempts to hook all users onto itself as the main gateway into a vast range of commercial and entertainment opportunities.
When discussing digital ecosystems, the technology and business press tends not to consider the phrase in terms of complex, large-scale technology systems which, theoretically at least, are open-ended and capable of evolving far beyond the plans of those who establish them. Instead, there is a tendency on the part of journalists to accept the definitions offered by the big tech companies themselves and treat platforms as a series of increasingly closed, proprietary systems. Thus, for example, Michelle Evans at Forbes can argue that integration between things such as iOS, the iPhone X, Apple Watch, and Apple Pay is transforming digital commerce (all the time keeping consumers within the Apple ecosystem), while John Thornhill observes that iOS can provide an important hub between a huge variety of “digital capitalism” services such as Uber and AirBnB;13 and yet, as Antonia Villas-Boas observes in the kind of article that has almost become a trope in recent years, “leaving the Apple ecosystem can be a tough thing to do”14 – intentionally so. If Web 2.0 was intended, among other things, to break down the walled garden between producers and consumers, the Big Five have devoted a great deal of time and effort wherever possible to rebuilding those walls, tempting users to return to a carefully regulated Eden where everything “just works”.
As such, this chapter tends to distinguish between digital ecosystems and media ecologies. This is not that the digital ecosystem is not a useful concept – it is – but that its increasingly prevailing use with regard to big tech tends to allow Google, Apple, Amazon, and others to define it in the more restrictive sense rather than as a true ecosystem; by the latter, this book means a system that considers the operations of such companies within a much wider context of interactions between a plurality of structures, economics, regulatory frameworks, organisations, and people. In many ways, the tension is between an assumption that, with enough data, any system can be perfectly determined versus the notion that any ecological system is always inherently complex. The development of complexity theory from the 1990s onwards deals with nonlinear systems capable of exhibiting emergent, self-organised and adaptive behaviour.15 Such theory is especially suited to the concepts of digital ecosystems outlined by Shadbolt and others, particularly with great advances in computing power. Yet, the desire of big tech to move towards monopolisation of information flows seeks to limit emergent behaviours among consumers so as better to guide them towards a particular platform – aided, as Franklin Foer observes, by governmental tendencies to view antitrust legislation through the eyes of Thurman Arnold’s distrust of inefficiency rather than Louis Brandeis’s attempts to combat monopolies as antithetical to public values.16 Because of a tendency to use the phrase “digital ecosystem” in a restrictive sense, media ecology is better suited for my purposes to describing large technology systems that are open to emergent and complex behaviour.
Media ecology as a concept is older than complexity theory: its roots lie, as with so much media theory, in the work of Marshall McLuhan and Walter Benjamin, but in the 1970s, Christine Nystrom and Neil Postman used the term to draw together observations by Kenneth Boulding, Thomas Kuhn, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that, during the twentieth century, a fundamental shift had taken place in mankind’s world view. As such, media ecology began to be formulated at in the early seventies as a metadiscipline engaged in the study of media and complex communication systems as environments.17 Lance Strate has recently outlined how the work of figures such as McLuhan and Postman, as well as other scholars such as Walter Ong, has created a rich context for artists, creatives, managers, executives, and even politicians in which the media operates within a field rather than a discipline and a well-defined subject, being fundamentally interdisciplinary.18 An essential tenet of media ecology, as Dennis Cali, drawing on Postman, observes is that “the introduction of any new agent into an environment changes that environment”.19 Although not discussed by Cali, this approach is particularly fruitful when viewed from the perspective of actor-network theory (ANT) as outlined by theorists such as Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, and John Law, especially insofar as it demonstrates the capacity of nonhuman actors to ...
