Web Theory

An Introduction

Robert Burnett, David Marshall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134556816
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Web Theory is a comprehensive and critical introduction to the theories of the internet and the world wide web. Robert Burnett and P. David Marshall examine the key debates which surround internet culture, from issues of globalisation, political economy and regulation, to ideas about communication, identity and aesthetics.
Web Theory explore the shifts in society, culture and the media which have been brought about by the growth of the world wide web. It identifies significant readings, web sites and hypertext archive sources which illustrate the critical discussion about the internet and it mediates these discussions, indicating key positions within each debate and pointing the reader to key texts.
Web Theory includes:
*Chapters showing how specific media have been affected by the internet
*Boxed case studies and examples
*References, an extensive bibliography and a list of web sites
*A glossary of key terms with important words highlighted in the text
*A Web Theory timeline which details important events
*A comprehensive and regularly updated website at www.webtheory.nu with inks and support material

Chapter 1
WEB OF TECHNOLOGY

Information Technology is friendly; it offers a helping hand; it should be embraced. We should think of it more like ET than IT.

Margaret Thatcher, 1982,
quoted in Robins and Webster (1999: 74)

Nicholas Negroponte opened his popular book Being Digital with a peculiar list of the near future and how digital technology will get us there:

Early in the next millennium your right and left cuff links or earrings may communicate with each other by low-orbiting satellites and have more computer power than your present PC. Your telephone won’t ring indiscriminately, it will receive, sort, and perhaps respond to your incoming calls like a well-trained English butler. Mass Media will be redefined by systems for transmitting and receiving personalized information and entertainment. Schools will change to become more like museums and playgrounds for children to assemble ideas and socialise with other children all over the world… Twenty years from now, when you look out a window, what you see may be five thousand miles and six times zones away…

(Negroponte 1995: 6–7)

THIS KIND OF reading of the future through technology has a long history and a very large popular impact on how we receive any current generation of technology such as the Web. In the past World Expositions such as the New York World’s Fair of 1932 would be a magical site of what the future would be like and help stimulate the cultural imagination. Aerodynamic cars racing above the surface, sleek angular buildings and the prevalence of modern conveniences for the home were all part of the imagined future provided by corporations that participated in that exposition. At the beginning of the twentieth century the skyscraper provided the image of both progress and the future. The dizzying heights were monuments of human achievement, power and ultimately an expression of the triumph of modernity and civilization. The continuing race to have the tallest building (Kuala Lumpur’s Twin Towers) or freestanding structure in the world (CN Tower) is a testament to how technology expresses the future in its present forms.

In a similar vein, the introduction of home computers in the early 1980s produced a series of magazine articles and book chapters that celebrated telecommuting culminating in the ‘microcomputer’ becoming Time Magazine ‘Person of the Year’ for 1982 (Dyer-Witheford 1999: 21): instead of coming into the smog-filled city, the new worker managed to produce their intellectual labour at their cottage by the lake. A real cottage industry that resembled the production of crafts was heralded for the digital age. Where the industrial revolution produced problems, the post-industrial revolution promised through information and computer technology a path to what could be called a new traditionalism. In the 1985 film Brainstorm, there was a depiction of this new idyllic life that was connected to high technology. Although the lead character was producing a sophisticated virtual reality device, he casually and pleasantly rode on a sophisticated tricycle to and from work, where work was part of both the home and the office.

Past media forms have provided similar depictions of the future. When radio was first developed and introduced it was generally believed to offer a path to a better future. Education and the more general desire for human betterment accompanied the emergence of radio and a similar range of desires were placed on television as it emerged in the 1930s and 1940s. (Douglas 1987; Winston 1998: 81; McChesney 1990).

With this long history of presenting technology in utopian terms, it seems natural and inevitable that the Web was presented as offering a future paradise for users as it emerged as a generally available platform in the 1990s. Writers such as Rheingold (1994) in his influential book, The Virtual Community underlined the communitarian qualities of the Web. Communities could be developed without the past restrictions of spatial constraints. In a blending of new age philosophy with computer-mediated communications, the Internet provided the means to make a more active and engaged public that would allow a new era of truer and greater democracy. The Web offered a wide array of dimensions that promised a better world: e-commerce provided better business solutions; the massive amount of information on the Web meant it was ultimately the most interesting and diverse library available for education; and its transnational quality allowed for greater global communication and–the generally implied–understanding than could be imagined through past media forms.

When one reads the ruminations on the future from George Gilder (1994), Bill Gates (1996) or a host of what we can group as futurologists a coordinated description of the power and value of the Web is painted. In perfect synergy, the newspaper supplements of the mid-1990s that focused on the Web provided a general discourse of wonder and urgency that everyone should come online.

The Web’s introduction in its close parallel with the introduction of other technologies identifies that there has been an ideology of technology operating in contemporary culture. What we mean by ideology is a framework of representations that makes whatever is current appear to be completely normal, natural and appropriate. An ideology that is concerned with technology therefore makes any new technology not only natural and normal for the culture but also what is needed to make the society better. In other words, an ideology of technology creates a desire for the cultural transformation promised by technology. It serves to reduce public debate about the technology and shifts most discussion to a functional level of how to expand, implement and integrate the new technology into our everyday lives. Critics have called this ideology a form of ‘technological rationality’ (Marcuse 1964; Habermas 1975) or ‘instrumental reason’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1987) where there is a simple means-end approach to its implementation. For the Web, debate might be reduced to how do we get greater numbers of people online rather than what kind of content or structures will be available online. Or perhaps it leads to a continuing and spiralling drive to technical perfectionism on the Web, where the current version is perpetually obsolete and technologically unsophisticated and we are encouraged to purchase the latest computer and load the latest software to participate in, for example, new versions of video and audio streaming or other forms of virtuality. In an ideology of technology we have accepted the speed of technological obsolescence and have naturalized our consumer desires that we cannot really be happy without the latest model. For many of us, this ideology of technology is a cultural reality that shapes our everyday lives. Many Web and computer-related corporations depend on that ideology to continue to operate as a constitutive element of contemporary society and to produce what Webster and Robins (1999: 2–3) describe as ‘technoculture’.

In media and communication studies, the concept of technological determinism is generally used to describe this power of technology over a culture and is very useful in understanding the current power of the Web and where that power originates. McQuail (1994: 107) defines technological determinism as ‘the links between the dominant communication technology of an age and the key features of society’. To make the definition complete there are some other elements of technological determinism that need to be identified:

Technological determinism often highlights an inevitability around technological change

There is a resignation about the nature of change in a culture because of the power of the dominant technology to determine how people interact. From a technological determinist perspective, we as a society often are reacting to technological change. Past technologies such as television produced a certain kind of culture: in its broadcast form it may have privileged the nation state and national identities in the twentieth century. The Web, if it is in fact becoming the dominant communication technology of this century, produces a non-broadcast structure and potentially a non-national structure.

Technological determinism as an approach has produced a dialectic of utopian and dystopian views of technology in culture

As much as there has been a celebration of technology by the futurologists that we have described above, there is an antithetical relationship to its value in culture. For instance, popular cultural forms such as novels and films often dance between the utopian and dystopian. William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels such as the original Neuromancer (1984) present a stark and bleak world as people jack-in to a parallel cyberspace that occasionally transforms them (‘their wetware’) irrevocably. In the film The Matrix, we learn that the future world is entirely simulation as humans are used as an energy source to power a machine world. Clearly these and other representations of the future, including the Terminator films, Blade Runner, and countless others, present a negative and dystopian future through technology. But in an odd paradox their various special effects are celebrated as technological breakthroughs in the various promotion and publicity campaigns that surround these films. As filmgoers, the film narrative contradicts the very reason and the kinds of pleasures we derive from a film that relies on new technology: we go to enjoy the technological effects even as we view the dystopian future that is produced by the technology.

The dystopian technological determinism has a couple of variations that intersect with the emergence of the Web. For instance, Alvin Toffler’s general approach as a futurologist is a scare tactic: the speed of technological change will leave you behind and so he entreats you to act on what is about to change around you. Toffler (1970, 1980) maintains an inevitability about technological change that is dangerous if not heeded. Fundamentally, the Web implies a new information-driven society that implies different kinds of work and forms of knowledge.

Popular journalism and some psychological studies have linked Web technology to a form of addiction that indicates that the technology itself has the capacity to transform human behaviour at an almost physiological level by its very nature. This form of technological determinism is not necessarily new–television has long been written about as an addiction (Winn 1977)–but it has been adapted to several features of the Web. For instance, many articles have been written about individuals addicted to Internet Relay Chat programs or to what is often called virtual sex on the Web. A particular panic developed around the early MUDs which operated as interactive role-playing games that were perceived to absorb completely adolescent boys. This fear of the power of Web technology continues to be a source of new news stories; even consultancies have sprung up which help you or someone you know lose their addiction to the Internet.

Technological determinism is generally a term used to critique the various approaches specifically because of the reduction of historical, social and cultural processes to one causal factor

Technological determinism is used as a critical analytical tool to group a certain generalizable approach to the relationship between technology and society. It would be rare to see one of the writers we have isolated here as describing him or herself as a technological determinist. The critique of technological determinism is that it is a reductionist reading of the contemporary or future world. There is a complex interplay of social, economic, governmental and cultural needs that help determine the successful adoption of a technology such as the Web. For example, if we look at the history of the Web it developed from very specific but intricate institutional connections. (See the Web Theory timeline in the Appendix for greater detail.) Its original US military origins as a system that would have no centre so that communication could be maintained despite the most apocalyptic nuclear attack on any individual centre allowed for the development of the multiple nodes of CERN and ARPAnet. The network of networks structure of the Internet has built from these origins but advanced in its application as a research network that became wedded to university research. However, the original intention of the network was military information and research, while the Internet’s connection to universities presented a different kind of institutional direction. For example, research is often exchanged freely between different researchers in order to advance a certain kind of knowledge. Informal networks of researchers then used the Internet for these exchanges of information. This kind of university culture with its accessible libraries, its general direction of dissemination of information and knowledge is fundamentally different from the military’s desire for control and regulation of the flows of information for usually highly specific and often classified, national security reasons. When the exchanges between university researchers began to diverge from their research and into more interpersonal and recreational communication exchanges, elements of how we see the Web today began emerging in earnest. Computer pictures–sometimes pornographic–were exchanged. Personal details and relationships were tagged on to the end of correspondences, and computer games began circulating. For instance, one of the most popular computer games in the 1970s was a game of skill requiring the user/player to land the lunar module on the Moon (Poole 2000: 29–30). Other information began being deposited and available via the Internet. Systems such as the University of Minnesota’s Gopher allowed one to search categories of material that were made available by other researchers. In conjunction with these developments, the expansion of telephone connections via modem technology to this emerging Internet allowed for its use to move outside the research institutions and into people’s homes. Parallel networks developed that were more closely connected to people’s hobbies rather than their research and a rapid proliferation of bulletin boards developed for exchanges of information. Because the early users of the Internet were more computer literate there was a tendency for these early bulletin boards to have a science fiction or fantasy focus that paralleled the computer culture’s interests. Thus sites devoted to Star Trek or Dr Who or particular science fiction authors, films and novels were some of the most popular bulletin boards that eventually came to be called usegroups and newsgroups.

What one should notice about this history of the Web is its unravelling of the original technological intention: the military purpose seems almost incidental. Because of the variety of institutions that were connected to the Internet and the emergence of the Web, it cannot be reduced to simple causal factors. The Web that we see today has relied on a government connection that has produced a quasi-public service quality to the Web even as it has been commercialized throughout the 1990s. The result: continuing tension between its public role and the desires to make it increasingly commercial. Technological determinism oversimplifies the process of social use of a technology that transforms the technology and the institutional web of power that also shapes any cultural technology.

Nonetheless, a number of writers and thinkers that can be grouped as technological determinists have produced some interesting insights around the emergence of new technologies. And although their approach should always be treated with limited applicability it is worthwhile detailing what they have tried to explain in their work. Part of understanding the Web’s current presence can be elucidated through people such as H.A. Innis (1950, 1951), Marshall McLuhan (1962, 1965), and Lewis Mumford (1963) and more recent writers who have used their insights to make sense of contemporary technologies such as the Web. Our objective here is to highlight their utility in studying the Web by isolating on what theoretical insights they have provided in their work.

THE BIAS OF COMMUNICATION

One of the richest resources for studying the emergence of new technologies is a Canadian political economic historian H.A. Innis. Most of his early writings dealt with detailed economic histories of staple industries which shaped the relationships between colonies and empires (Innis 1940). The long and intricate history of the fur trade between Canada and Europe helped Innis develop a very interesting model of exchange and communication that he expanded in his work just before his death (Innis 1956). Although others have elaborated on his approach with other metaphors, Innis established the concept of centre–peripheral economic relations which helped shape the very transport and communication routes that were established in perceived-to-be-new territories such as Canada. For Innis, transport and communication were not so clearly separated and were very much conceptualized on a related continuum. Thus a road served not only as part of a transport system; it also verged on the quality of a communication medium in its promotion of exchange and, both by its use and physical presence, a relationship to the centre’s power. What fundamentally linked transport and communication in Innis’s innovative ponderings was their relationship to another continuum that he conceptualized in two polar extremes: space and time (Innis 1951).

Innis developed a grand theory of history that tried to demarcate the relationship a particular culture had to space and time. The key defining causal factor according to Innis was related to the dominant form of communication. Each communication technology betrayed a bias towards either spatial or temporal concerns. That particular bias of communication would shape the nature of that society and, like an Achilles heel, would lead to its inevitable decline or its inherent limitation. A medium of communication was either concerned with a preservation of information (time-biased) or capacity for wide distribution (space-biased). With past civilizations Innis’s approach is revealing (Innis 1951).

An oral-based culture, Innis considered to be one that worked on the maintenance of traditions, rituals of life, death and ancestry–in other words a bias towards linking the present with the past. Because of its oral communication form, the actual size of the culture is inherently limited: messages had to be passed interpersonally and knowledge also had to be relayed verbally. Memory of the explanatory tales and legends served as the guides for future generations’ actions and were kept by a limited number of high priests(esses) or oracles as they were called in ancient Greece. Extensions of time-biased communication forms might be the communication medium of writing on clay tablets or conveying one’s culture through the depictions of temple architecture: both of these examples indicate the relative immobility of the dominant communication media and therefore bias towards the maintenance of temporal continuities. Time-biased societies tended to be more insular and clearly less open to exchange with other cultures and traditions and therefore ultimately conservative in their sustenance through establishing the flow from ancestors to descendents.

In contrast, a space-biased culture, worked with communication technologies that allowed for much wider dissemination and exchange. If stone and clay tablets made it difficult to move messages around, the development of papyrus–the precursor of paper–permitted the ability to transfer commands, orders and general information much further. Paper in conjunction with a relatively simple script of characters in written form like the alphanumeric system, allowed the capacity to dominate greater and greater territories. Innis’s example of the Roman Empire’s form of communication that only worked with a transport network that also was spatially biased allowed control to be exercised from the Roman centre to the barbaric limits of the empire like Hadrian’s Wall on the border between Scotland and ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• WEB THEORY
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• TABLES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1: WEB OF TECHNOLOGY
• CHAPTER 2: INFORMATION AND NETWORKS
• CHAPTER 3: THE WEB AS COMMUNICATION
• CHAPTER 4: WEBS OF IDENTITY
• CHAPTER 5: THE LOOK OF THE WEB
• CHAPTER 6: THE WEB ECONOMY
• CHAPTER 7: THE WEB OF POLICY, REGULATION AND COPYRIGHT
• CHAPTER 8: THE WEB OF INFORMATIONAL NEWS
• CHAPTER 9: WEB OF ENTERTAINMENT
• CONCLUSION
• GLOSSARY
• WEB THEORY TIMELINE (1990 TO 2001)
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• WEB SITE RESOURCES