1 Introduction to New Media

Questions to Consider
• How is communication mediated by technology? Why is th is significant?
• Why is it important to th ink about new media from a wide range of perspectives?
• What are th e various ways t hat t he "digital divide" can be understood and w hat
are t he causes and consequences of such divides?
• In what ways is global ization significa nt when th inking about new media?
• Why do you th ink th e Int ern et and Web 2.0 have become so popular? What are
some benefits and drawbacks of th is popu larity?

Chapter Outline
This chapter introduces new media by asking what is new about new media and what role
does it play in social change. New media is deeply embedded in the politics, processes, and
practicalities of our society. We explore how new media is an outcome of the digitization
of content, which has enabled convergence-the process by which media technologies, in-
dustries, and services merge-through changes in computing, communication networks,
and content. Although convergence is important, we attempt to put these changes in per-
spective and recognize that longstanding social, cultural, political, and economic factors
remain important and mitigate and filter the impact of technological change. This chapter
explains the characteristics of digital information and how those characteristics result in
a particular type of communication that can be summed up as interactive. We examine
the Internet as one of the most important new media forms of the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries, and review its history, social implications, and recent growth into
Web 2.0, focusing on the role of search engines. We also look at the importance of online
encyclopedias, status updates, friend lists, and online video in the context of a growing
and globalizing technology. The chapter concludes with a deeper examination of the
implications of convergence on how we create and consume media content and the role of
Web 2.0 in this process.
2 New Media

Why "New" Media?

This book introduces new media, what it is, where it came from, and where it is head-
ing. Defining new media is one of the first challenges in tackling this subject. Are we just
speaking about media-the tools of communication-that is new? How new? What is the
division between old and new? Aren't all media forms at one time or another new? Rather
than a simple chronological list, or a cut-off created by some sort of technical achievement,
maybe we should ask ourselves why some media are considered "new."
There is a temptation to simply list the latest developments in media technologies and
call these new. Yet this approach is inadequate, partly because the rate of change in media
technologies, services, and uses is so rapid that any list of this sort will quickly become
dated. At one extreme, "newness" can simply refer to updates of long-established com-
modities, as when car manufacturers reveal their "new" line of vehicles for the coming
year, television networks present the "newest" sitcom or reality show, or mobile phone
companies announce their latest model that is jewel-encrusted or has a relocated camera.
These are (mostly) superficial changes with no significance to society as a whole.
Focusing on "newness" is also problematic because media technologies now con-
sidered to be "old," such as film, radio, and television, were themselves once new (Gitelman
and Pingree 2003; Marvin 1988). What would be the process of removing a technology
from the list, once it is on there?
Another approach would be to create a list of technologies that should be included for
some reason or another, and focus on those. To many of those born after the 1980s, whom
Marc Prensky (2001) terms digital natives, a world without the Internet, email, mobile
phones, video games, digital cameras, and instant text messaging is either unimaginable
or contrived, as for a holiday. Indeed, in developed countries, the likely list of"new media"
technologies- networked personal computers and mobile phones- are now so common
in our work, our homes, and the many everyday interactions we have with each other,
that they have ceased to be "new" in any meaningful sense of the term. As a result, any
approach to new media that simply catalogues the technologies themselves but fails to ask
broader questions about their contextual use and their social and cultural impacts ignores
the central question of why there is a need to look at new media in the first place.
There is a need, as Sonia Livingstone notes, to ask, "What's new for society about the
new media?" rather than simply, "What are the new media?" (1999: 60) This takes us to the
larger question of whether, and how, technologies can act as factors in wider social change
while being already embedded in a social context (Cowan 1997; Flichy 2005). In Novum
Organum, first published in 1620, the English philosopher Francis Bacon proposed that
three discoveries were central to marking out the period in which he lived as one that was
dramatically different from those preceding it:

It is well to observe the force and effect and consequences of discoveries. These are
to be seen nowhere more conspicuously than in those three that were unknown
to the ancients, and of which the origin, though recent, is obscure: namely, print-
ing, gunpowder, and the magnet. For these three have changed the whole face
and state of things throughout the world; the first in literature, the second in
warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes. (as
quoted in Graham 1999: 26-7)
 1 Introduction to New Media 3

Communications
Networks

Mobile Cable TV,

Telephony Interactive TV
Internet
and World
Wide Web

Computing/
Information CD-ROM, Content
Technology DVD (Media)

Figure 1.1 The Three Cs of Convergent Media

Source: Adapted from Barr, Trevor (2000). The Changing Face of Australia's Media and Communications, Allen & Unwin, Sydney.

If printing presses, guns, and compasses changed Bacon's world, how is new media
changing ours? A first step toward speaking meaningfully about new media, we need to
define it more precisely, not just in terms of newness. One way to understand new media
is to break it down into components. The "three Cs" of computing, communication, and
content is one way that new media has been defined in previous editions of this book (Flew
2002, 2005; Flew and Smith 2011, 2014) and elsewhere:

1. computing and information technology (IT);

2. communications networks; and
3. content (cf. Barr 2000; Miles 1997; Rice 1999).

Convergent media can be seen as the outcome of combining computing, communications,

and media content as shown in Figure 1.1.

Convergence
Convergence can mean many things. In one sense, it refers to the way in which media
businesses have changed. Media are no longer defined by their physical (or electronic)
medium: "print," "radio," and "television" are not useful categories any more, from the
point of view of the business owner, since content generally goes out over all possible
channels and media. For media companies, computers and the Internet have produced an
interlinking of computing, communications networks, and media content, and they have
been doing this now for over 40 years, since the first CD-ROMs and then the development
4 New Media

and popularization of the Internet. Convergence also refers to the overlapping products,
services, and activities that have emerged in the digital media space. So, for example, we
not only have media companies that own Internet companies, but also television shows
with complementary websites, all available on devices such as mobile phones and comput-
ers. Phones and computers, historically seen as dedicated devices for conversations and
calculations, are the new media conduits. Many see this as simply the tip of the iceberg,
since all aspects of institutional activity and social life- from art to business, government
to journalism, health to education- are increasingly conducted in an interactive digital
media environment, across a plethora of networked information and communication
technology (ICT) devices. This ubiquity, the possibility that one might speak of conver-
gence from three quite different perspectives (technology, services, and industries) makes
the term not only "slippery" but also prone to confusion among new media writers and
students. The careful reader is wise to pay attention to which of the three (or which com-
binations of these aspects) is being referred to when reading about convergence.
A report by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission
(CRTC) shows, "In 2008, 80% of communications revenues in Canada were generated
collectively by eight communications companies that provided both broadcasting and
telecommunications services." (2010: fn 179). In the fall of 2012, the CRTC considered an
application for the merger of Bell and Astral, two giants of both conventional and digital
media. Although the proposal was initially rejected by CRTC, the merger was approved in
June 2013, following some amendments. The proponents of this deal argued that it was ne-
cessary to merge their companies to compete in a globally converged industry. Figure 1.2
illustrates how convergence is situated within a larger dynamic of telecommunications
operating platforms. It should be noted, however, that interactivity and the complexity of
convergence are not fully captured here; both of these are discussed later in the chapter.

Supplier Platforms Custome r

>
Over the air

!-----,/~============~==-==============~====
~---=-'>
Content
:::::::::::;_ _ _ _ __::S::::_at::::_e;:llit_::::e---;======::-...,-.,.

• · =- - ~ I ··· --..C
>
- _- _- _- _J-_- _- _-

>
Providers
... ...
· · ••• Consume r
·· ·

Figure 1.2 Broadcasting and Te lecommunications Operating Platforms

Source: Reproduced w ith th e permission of the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission on behalf of
Her M ajesty in Rights of Canada, 201 7.
 1 Introduction to New Media 5

For writers such as Thomas Friedman (2005), convergence is in turn generating a

global "flat earth," where activities conducted through digital media can occur in any
part of the world. We note in later chapters that there are reasons to question this claim,
and that culture, policy, and other variables remain critical to the geographic location of
new media activities. Nevertheless, convergence opens up the possibility of much broader
geographic reach in the production and consumption of media.
The second element of convergence is the morphing of devices (computers, mobile
phones, televisions, etc.) as they become multi-purpose conduits for a range of activities
involving digital media (Zetie 2004). For example, computers become telephones via
Skype, mobile phones like the iPhone are now major platforms for playing games, and new
generations oflnternet-enabled televisions have acquired multimedia capabilities through
widgets that display online content.
New media can also be thought of as digital media. Digital media are forms of media
content that combine and integrate data, text, sound, and images of all kinds; are stored in
digital formats; and are increasingly distributed through networks such as those based on
broadband fibre-optic cables, satellites, and microwave transmission systems. Such media,
or forms of digital information, have the following characteristics:

• manipulable: digital information is easily changeable and adaptable, at all stages of

creation, storage, delivery, and use;
• networkable: digital information can be shared and exchanged among large numbers
of users simultaneously, and across enormous distances;
• dense: very large amounts of digital information can be stored in small physical
spaces (e.g., USB flash drives) or on network servers;
• compressible: the amount of capacity that digital information takes up on any net-
work can be reduced dramatically through compression, and decompressed when
needed;and
• impartial: digital information carried across networks is indifferent to how it is repre-
sented, who owns or created it, or how it is used.1

This still leaves open, however, the question of what is new for society from the new media.
In this text, we take a broad social focus toward new media and stress the need to be aware
of the importance of how communication is mediated by technology. We follow Lievrouw
and Livingstone (2005: 2) in their observation that any approach to thinking about new
media needs to take account of three elements: (1) the artifacts or devices that enable and
extend our ability to communicate; (2) the communication activities and practices we
engage in to develop and use these devices; and (3) the social arrangements and organiza-
tions that form around these devices and practices.
Lievrouw and Livingstone also make the point that these three elements should not
be thought of as linear or layered-technologies influencing communications practices, in
turn shaping social arrangements and institutions-but rather as constituting an ensemble
characterized by "dynamic links and interdependencies among artefacts, practices, and
social arrangements that ... guide our analytic focus" (2005: 3). In this way, critical analy-
sis of new media also has wider implications for how the media is studied more generally,
since media studies as it emerged in the twentieth century understood media production,
texts, and audiences as discrete forms, following a linear model of different moments in the
6 New Media

media production-consumption cycle. Figure 1.3 illustrates how wireless media has, in the
past 30 years, become a disrupting innovation in the field of media production.
In practical terms, what differentiates old media from new media, when you take into
account the five characteristics of digital media listed above and Lievrouw and Living-
stone's "three elements" (artifacts, activities, and arrangements), is that new media are
interactive in a way that previous media were not usually thought to be. Old and trad-
itional media, however, are still the basis for much of the conceptual apparatus that we
bring to the media both as audience and producers. We regularly see new media under-
takings that reconceive, or remediate in Bolter and Grusin's language (Bolter and Grusin
2000), existing media forms.
Online and console-based games, websites, and instant-messaging services, for ex-
ample, all extend our abilities, change our practices, and transform social arrangements
through significant levels of interactivity. Media technologies that were previously dom-
inated by a one-way flow of content (newspapers, film, radio, television) are giving way to
media forms that are inherently and profoundly interactive and two-way to varying de-
grees and yet many are owned by the same companies, contain much of the same content,
and are sometimes thought of in similar ways.

25,000

20,000

15,000

10,000

5,000

1984 1988 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 2010 2011 2012 2013 201 4 2015

- - Wire line - - Wire less - - Internet A ccess - - Cable, Sat & IPTV
Broadcast TV .................. Pay & Spee TV ········· Total TV ·· ... · Radio

· ·- · ·- · Newspapers - - Magazines - •- Internet Adv - - - Music

Figure 1.3 Separate Media, Distinct Evolutionary Paths and the Network Media
Eco nomy, 1984-2015 (curre nt $)
Source: Reproduced w ith permission of the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project.
 1 Introduction to New Media 7

While interactivity has been around a long time (telegraph, telephone, and point-to-
point radio all had some element of interactivity), its use was restricted to exchanges be-
tween individuals, mostly in the form of one-to-one conversations. Mass media, like TV
and radio, could bring together large audiences, but at the expense of reducing the back
and forth conversation to a one-way message. New media has both the power of the mass
media to aggregate large groups and the ability of interactive media to involve partici-
pants. This blend oflarge groups and interactivity is just one of the things that makes new
media distinctive from previous media forms; as we will see later in this chapter, in our
discussion of Web 2.0, the notion of "interactivity" has been extended in all kinds of ways,
powered by the computers and networks that are the underpinnings of new media. There is
a kind of interactivity in the way in which people can create and modify Wikipedia pages,
for example. Interactivity is found in pure creation (e.g., a video uploaded to YouTube or
created in Snapchat) to aggregation/curation, as in the playlists of Spotify. And (almost)
everything provides the possibility of commenting, replying, forwarding, and (sometimes)
saving. Even the ephemeral nature of some of the newest chat and video chat platforms
is a new kind of interactivity, in a way, hearkening back to live, in-person conversations
where you had to be there. In fact, another interesting quirk of new media is the way that
it explores every nuance and subtlety of possible media forms, some of which explode in
popularity, others of which disappear without a trace, and almost all of which have as their
core value something that human beings love to do: communicate with each other.

Internet History
The concept of new media is integrally bound up with the history of the Internet and the
Web. And it is tangled up in the past, present, and future of prior technologies (e.g., fixed
location telephone and telegraph networks) and parallel technologies such as the mobile
phone. In fact, the mobile phone, which seemed to be "just a phone that moved" at first, is
more commonly a network and media device now, and for many people it is the primary
new media device in their lives. At this point, it may be fair to just lump the mobile phone
in with "Internet and Web" since, for a large percentage of the users, for a large percentage
of the time, the mobile device is used less often for making calls and more often as a plat-
form for new media applications and activities (Smith 2015).
While convergence has now spread across a range of platforms and devices, it was
the emergence and mass popularization of the Internet that heralded the rise of new
media, bringing together computing and information technologies, communications
networks, and media content. It should be noted here that the Internet refers to both of
the following:

1. a technical infrastructure of computers and other digital devices (e.g., servers, routers)
permanently connected through high-speed telecommunications networks; and
2. the forms of content, communication, and information sharing that occur through
these networks.

In their analysis of the social implications of the Internet, sociologists DiMaggio,

Hargittai, Neuman, and Robinson define the Internet as "the electronic network of net-
works that links people and information through computers and other digital devices
8 New Media

allowing person-to-person communication and information retrieval" (DiMaggio et al.

2001: 307). In 1995, the Internet Society (ISOC) developed a more technical definition,
which resolved that the Internet

refers to the global information system that: (i) is logically linked together by a
globally unique address space based on the Internet Protocol (IP) or its subsequent
extensions/follow-ons; (ii) is able to support communications using the Transmis-
sion Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite or its subsequent extensions/
follow-ons, and/or other IP-compatible protocols; and (iii) provides, uses or makes
accessible, either publicly or privately, high level services layered on the communi-
cations and related infrastructure described herein. (Leiner et al. 2003)

A key point about the history of the Internet is that it not only developed in parallel with
the general development of personal computers and other devices for digital informa-
tion processing and retrieval, but its history is both a history of the common networking
protocols for the transfer of digital information and a history of systems for the publica-
tion, organization, and distribution of this information. 2 Figure 1.4 provides an overview
of this growth, with data from all of the content industries.
The technical history of the Internet has been well documented and will not be dis-
cussed in great detail here; however, it is worth reviewing several elements of this history.
First, while the commitment to developing an integrated communications network arose
in the United States as a consequence of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the priorities
of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)-established in 1957 after the Soviets
launched the Sputnik satellite-were arguably driven as much by the desire of the US

9,000

8,000

7,000

6,000

5,000 TV

Radio
4,000
Newspapers
3,000 Mags
Int ernet Adv
2,000
M usic

1,000

0
1984 1988 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

Figure 1.4 Revenues for the Content Industries, 1984-2015 (current$ m illions)
Source: Reproduced with permission of the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project.
 1 Introduction to New Media 9

scientific community to perfect mechanisms of communicating with one another as by

the demands of the military. 3 The most significant development to come from ARPA in the
1960s was packet switching. Packet switching meant that long messages could be broken
down into smaller "packets"; messages could be rerouted if there was a blockage at one
message route or point of connection between two computers; and messages would be sent
in an asynchronous mode, meaning that the message would not come to the receiver until
some time after it was originally sent. Not only did packet switching overcome limitations
of the telephone system, such as the possibility of blocked access because of heavy use
by others, but it also established the principle of a decentralized network with no single
point from which control can be exercised, which has been so central to the Internet's
development (Gillies and Cailliau 2000: 18-25). With the establishment of ARPANET as
a national long-distance computer network in the United States in 1969, packet switch-
ing became central to this network, with the transfer of electronic mail being perhaps
the major communications innovation arising from this development. In 1972, ARPANET
demonstrated to the public its capacity to send and receive data at the International Con-
ference on Computer Communication in Washington, DC, where the world's first email
was sent-although it wasn't called this at the time (Hassan 2004: 13).
Another landmark in Internet technical history was the development of a common
set of networking protocols, which enabled researchers in the various local area networks
(LANs) to communicate with one another, through the interconnection of these LANs
within a wide area network (WAN). The major breakthrough came in 1974, when Robert
Kahn and Vinton Cerf proposed a common switching protocol that could meet the needs
of an open-architecture network; this came to be known as TCP/IP (transmission con-
trol protocol/Internet protocol). The quasi-privatization of ARPANET in 1983, which al-
lowed universities and commercial interests to play a larger role on the network and which
marked the birth of the Internet we know today, was premised on the adoption of TCP/
IP as a common interconnection protocol. In sharp contrast to other media, the Inter-
net would become both a public and a global communications medium, as all computers
and computer networks could communicate with one another in a common language,
whether they were Apples, PCs, or mainframes, regardless of the local or national comput-
ing network within which they were operating. As Internet use spread in the 1980s from
outside its core constituency of the US government and military, scientists, and defence
contractors, the importance of TCP/IP being established as a common Internet protocol
would be of increasing significance to more and more people worldwide.
The development of the Web in the 1990s, however, was a major advancement that
made the Internet what it is today. While developments such as TCP/IP and packet switching
provided the means by which networks could connect with other networks, and comput-
ers could connect with other computers, the question of how people could connect with
other people through such electronic networks had not received as much attention. The con-
ception of the Web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, and its development by Berners-Lee and
colleagues at CERN (Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire, or the European Organ-
ization for Nuclear Research) from 1991 onwards would dramatically change the communi-
cations capabilities of the Internet. The significance of developing the Web became even
more apparent in 1992 when Marc Andreesen of the National Center for Supercomputer
Applications (NCSA) developed Mosaic as the first popular web browser. Andreesen went on
to become one of the founders of Netscape Communication, which developed Netscape, the
10 New Media

first major commercial web browser, in 1994. Microsoft quickly followed suit in 1995 with
the release of its Internet Explorer browser-as part of its Windows 95 software suite-to
much fanfare and to the sounds of the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up."
The ability to use web browsers such as Netscape and Internet Explorer to access
online content through the Web saw the mass popularization of the Internet, with the
number of Internet users worldwide growing by over 1,300 per cent between 1994 and
1998 (see Table 1.1 on page 15). Several features of the Web were particularly important in
this popularization. First, it allowed for the display of colourful pictures, music, and audio
as well as data and text, and introduced multimedia capability to the Internet. Second, it
was based on hypertext principles. Hypertext allows for the linking of information, where
links from one information source provide simple point-and-dick access to related infor-
mation available from other sources. The concept of hypertext had circulated in various
domains since the publication of Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think" in 1945,
which proposed the development of a computational machine (the "Memex") that not
only could store vast amounts of information but also could allow users to create ancil-
lary "thought trails" (Bush 1996). Ted Nelson's experimentations with hypertext through
Project Xanadu in the 1960s and early 1970s pointed to the possibilities of interconnected
electronic writing, and both the French Minitel system (developed as a national teletext
system in 1983) and the Hypercard storage system (available on all Apple computers from
1987 to well into the 1990s) drew on hypertext principles in different ways. The value
of hypertext became even more apparent with the development not only of web brows-
ers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Explorer but also of directories and search
engines such as Yahoo!, Alta Vista, and Google, which provided vast and simple-to-use
databases that gave users easy access to information stored on the Internet. Third, the
Web was associated with the development of both the common hypertext transfer proto-
col (HTTP), which provided a platform-independent means of interconnection between
websites, and hypertext markup language (HTML) as a relatively straightforward means of
writing source code for the Web. As a result, a much wider range of people could become
producers, as well as consumers, of content on the Web. This trend would gain momentum
as commercial software for developing web pages became increasingly available- such as
Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft Front Page-and this has been further acceler-
ated by the development of programs associated with what is known as Web 2.0 (see pages
25- 30 for more on the nature and impact of Web 2.0).

The People behind the Internet and the Applications Side of

Internet History
It is tempting to think of the Internet in terms of its signature technologies (switches,
fibre-optic cables) and software (TCP/IP, SMTP, DNS)- and certainly these played a key
role in the making of the Internet, but there is more to the story. Internet technologies en-
abled information to move from place to place and paved the way for email and computer
sharing, but these capabilities alone were not sufficiently attractive to the world at large to
account for the mass popularization of the Internet.
The Internet graduated from being a computer network akin to a highway, to a "place"
with attractions along the way, in part because key entrepreneurs and their companies
helped create valuable online destinations for everyday users. Many of these destinations
 1 Introduction to New Media 11

allowed people to consume and share new media. Some of these sites provided services-
like the search engine Google (or, before it, Alta Vista and Yahoo!)-or hosted users' con-
tent, like Wikipedia and YouTube. To fully appreciate the history of the Internet, it is
important to consider some of these pioneering services and the remarkable people in-
volved in creating them.

Cataloguing and Searching

At first, the problem of finding things on the Internet was a non-issue because the only
stuff on there was put there for one user by another one. Typically, one user would send a
counterpart an Internet address-perhaps in the form oflogin information to a file trans-
fer protocol (FTP) server-and then whatever had been placed at that Internet address
could be retrieved via the expertise of both users. There was little content available or even
of interest to anonymous and non-expert users.
This all changed with the arrival of the Web.4 Very quickly, content proliferated and
finding something online became an enormous challenge. People tried to keep up, at
first by saving and sharing links to interesting Internet websites, but this was both over-
whelming and inadequate. Some organizations-perhaps recalling the challenges that a
profusion of new products meant for retailers at the beginning of the twentieth century-
decided to set up catalogues of all these new websites. They would turn the catalogues
into a business by selling advertising alongside the listings. One of the most successful of
these, and still in business nearly 20 years later-a remarkable achievement in the dot-corn
era-is Yahoo! (with its signature exclamation mark).
Yahoo! was built by a couple oflnternet entrepreneurs-the classic story of college stu-
dents with a great idea (founders Jerry Yang and David Filo were engineering students at
Stanford University when they started their Web project)-a site that would bring together
all kinds of useful website links, categorize them, and let the user either flip through them
by heading or search within the entire set. This latter feature quickly became the most
popular feature and the company focused on it, while adding additional properties (email,
picture sharing, and so on), either by building them on their own or buying promising
young companies. For example, Yahoo! purchased the famous picture-sharing site Flickr
in 2005, which was once a small start-up in Vancouver. 5 More recently, Facebook's pur-
chase of Instagram for more than USD $1 billion in early 2012 is another example of the
way in which companies grow through acquisition. 6
Searching for things, as anyone who has lost their keys knows all too well, can
be a tedious business at best. Until recently, humans coped with disorder by devising,
implementing, and sticking to a plan of organization (Weinberger 2008)-or at least
trying to do so. If you have not yet carefully devised a filing system for whatever paper
statements that accumulate in your life, you are not alone. Once we leave the realm of
physical objects, however, searching proves to be remarkably efficient, even if things
are not filed properly. After all, computers don't complain about the humdrum tasks
assigned to them. Searching, though, is not a simple task and doing it well proved to be
the making of another key Internet entrepreneurial duo: the founders of Google. Sergey
Brin and Larry Page, also college students, sought to help computers arrive at better
answers to people's search questions. Brin and Page did such a good job of it that Google
has become one of the most well-known companies in the world, and it outperforms all
other search engines.
12 New Media

Search engines are doubtlessly important from a technical and ease-of-use perspective,
but they have profound social, political, and cultural implications as well. Alex Halavais's
2008 book, Search Engine Society, tackles these important questions and, in particular,
examines how search engines affect politics and privacy. The search engine, as Halavais
concludes, is an important tool in the exercise of power in an information-rich society. For
example, it has become common practice that the first step to finding something online is
to google it. For many people, online searching is now second nature and, rather than book-
marking or remembering where they have been, users search again and again ("re-finding,"
as Halavais puts it). In this way, users are allowing search engines to determine the best path
to navigate, with profound implications for sites that do not rank highly in a search engine.

Encyclopedias
For more than a hundred years, average people have looked to an encyclopedia for answers
to everyday questions. The multi-volume family encyclopedia set was a resource for young
people doing homework assignments and helped settle many kitchen table arguments.
Not many people, however, would have imagined that they would participate in the cre-
ation of an encyclopedia. Early on in the history of the Internet, it became evident that
computers and networks would be a good way to distribute the type of knowledge that en-
cyclopedias contained. In fact, even before the Internet was in widespread use, Microsoft
founded a company devoted to selling encyclopedias on CD-ROM.
For Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, putting an encyclopedia online seemed like
an obvious thing to do, but how to get started? His first attempt seemed promising from
a technical point of view, but it took too long to get the encyclopedia entries through the
editorial process. In frustration, he decided to open up the submission and review system,
using a new set of tools known as "wiki" technology. The rest, as they say, is history. People
loved creating, editing, and, most of all, having access to the encyclopedia entries.
While there have been (and continue to be) controversies over the validity or reliabil-
ity of Wikipedia, it has survived both serious scientific scrutiny and public acceptance and
has become one of the most widely used sources of information on the Internet. Thou-
sands of Wikipedia entries are created each day and tens of thousands undergo constant
revision. Although Wikipedia's very popularity has also made it a target for pranks and
attacks, the "many editors" approach of the wiki software mitigates such problems. When
necessary, the managers of the site lock down a Wikipedia entry, but for the most part, the
site is maintained by the goodwill of many hundreds of thousands of amateur experts who
strive for a neutral point of view.

(Amateur) Filmmaking
While the amateur bird watcher or automobile enthusiast might be inclined to write an
online article about their favourite raptor or roadster, the Internet also has drawn the
attention of those working with audiovisual content. Although the Internet was launched
and initially functioned as a largely text-based medium, images and videos began to
appear online in the twenty-first century. Much of that content came from home users
who created so-called user-generated content.
Posting video online was difficult for amateurs until the arrival of video-dip shar-
ing on YouTube. Now owned by Google, YouTube was also started by a small team of
enthusiasts who famously uploaded a video of a trip to the zoo to start their web-based
 1 Introduction to New Media 13

service. 7 The team of three former PayPal employees (Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed
Karim) launched the service in February 2005 and sold it, less than two years later, for
USD $1.65 billion. The videos on YouTube (as with the textual contributions on Wikipedia,
although mainly less serious, and frequently silly or inane) can be enormously popular,
becoming in some instances among the most viewed images in history. "Gangnam Style"
by Psy, for example, had more than 2.7 billion views8 by January 2017. 9
Sites like YouTube make the circulation of amateur video much easier, but the cre-
ation of such video in the first place is the outcome of a downward spiral in the cost of
recording, editing, and compressing audiovisual material. As recently as the mid-1990s,
creating video content was expensive and cumbersome, and, once created, it was confined
to tape or film archives, difficult and expensive to duplicate and distribute. The rise oflow-
cost digital video recorders, coupled with staggering leaps in the processing power of per-
sonal computers, particularly in the area of graphic-processing capabilities, has made the
raw material of sites like YouTube something that can be accomplished by just about every
Internet citizen. In recent years, the addition of video recording capabilities to mobile
telephones has resulted in a second explosion of videos uploaded and circulated online,
often with explosive (literally) content. In fact, the distribution of videos from the July
2005 bombing in the London Underground (a.k.a. the Tube) is considered a turning point
in both the awareness and acceptance of amateur video as a record of serious events, and
not just the results of frat parties and pet tricks.10

Status/Friends
There was a time when the word friend was not used as a verb and following someone
had a very different connotation from what it does today. Social media sites such as
Facebook and Twitter-not to mention Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat-have not
only redefined the language used in communicating with others online, but they have
also become hubs for socializing, political organizing, and commercial promotions. With
1.79 billion members as ofJanuary 2017, 11 Facebook was by far the largest online commun-
ity, and it continues to grow rapidly. Although controversies have flared up from time to
time over photographs or comments inadvertently shared, or inadequate or ill-understood
privacy policies, the site that founder Mark Zuckerberg envisioned as a place to help people
"understand the world around them" remains relevant and integral to a broad spectrum of
users, from students to senior citizens.12
Facebook's assertion that its mission is to serve its customers first is not uncommon
on the Internet. A claim of working for the public good is typical of Internet compan-
ies, including Google's famous exhortation, "Don't be evil." Along the way to "aiding
understanding" or doing an Internet search, however, companies such as Facebook have
spawned an entire industry of add-ons, applications, and linkages to other online soft-
ware that generates considerable revenue. In the 2010s, on Facebook, people could play
Scrabble, work a farm, send each other (virtual) gifts, and spend a great deal of money.
The tractor sales in the Facebook application Farm Ville, according to Fortune magazine,
exceeded annual tractor sales-in numbers, if not revenue-in the United States by a
large margin (purportedly 500,000 a day versus 5,000 a year for John Deere, one of the
largest manufacturers). 13 Selling virtual tractors for USD $20 each was a good business
to be in, and Zynga, the creator of Farm Ville and other similar games, reportedly made
more than USD $500 million in 2010.
14 New Media

Zynga's challenges since 2011-its stock has tumbled, and Farm Ville in particular is
not as popular as it was back then-form an interesting footnote and highlight several key
differences between real-world and online businesses. Online businesses change much
more rapidly, and they are subject to upheavals and transformations (or even disappear-
ances), often because of changes made by a partner. While farming is an industry that has
changed greatly over the last 200 years, it remains a huge part of the Canadian economy.
It is not a fad, and it is too complicated for any one player to eliminate. Zynga's Farm Ville,
on the other hand, faced dwindling popularity with some people calling it-and the social
games category it epitomized-a kind of fad. More importantly, Zynga's business rela-
tionship with Facebook changed dramatically. The terms of how they interacted with the
Facebook user base and the Facebook "credits" system evolved over time, often as a result
of unilateral decisions made by Facebook, with the result being that investors saw Zynga's
stock price tumble in 2012. Questions were raised about the viability of Zynga. The com-
pany that Zynga was in 2010 was transformed and replaced.
Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 as
a side project or spinoff from a company called Odeo. As with the YouTube pioneers, some
of the principals had experience in previous social media sites, including Blogger (sold to
Google). They used their expertise to create Twitter, one of the first popular sites in North
America to have an explicitly mobile focus (the limitation to 140 characters was designed
for messages to be sent and received as text messages-or SMS-on mobile phones), al-
though it has since morphed into much more of an online service and is driven more by
apps on smartphones than text messages.
Facebook and Twitter each emphasize sharing brief updates, also known as
"microblogging." Facebook currently gives you a small box with "What's on your mind?"
(the question changes from time to time), while Twitter's web interface has retained its
simple look but eliminated any question/prompt and instead has a blank box with a count-
down of how many characters are left as users enter text. Both services encourage the user to
create, maintain, and build a social network. While they could be used to leave messages for
the general public, those actively using them soon acquire friends (Facebook) or followers
(Twitter) to share pithy remarks about life, the universe, and lunch ideas.
Each of these examples (Yahoo!, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter) uses a dif-
ferent kind of sharing. People share their words to create knowledge (Wikipedia), their
videos to entertain/enlighten (YouTube), and their statuses to create/maintain social net-
works (Facebook and Twitter). And while it may not be immediately obvious, people using
Yahoo!'s or Google's search engines also contribute to the value of the search engine with
every search they do. You may not realize it, but every Google search (and the choices you
make as a result of the search) provides a list of options, which are fed back into the Google
search engine to enhance and refine the search performance. This "implicit work" is as
much a form of user-generated content as that found with the other sites, if somewhat less
obvious to the uninitiated.
The fact that we are working to create the very things we consume is not lost on critics
of online services such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. As with earlier criticism of how
television viewers were "working" by watching advertisements and thereby learning to
consume, Internet critics charge that not only are we working by viewing online ads, but
we are also actually providing all of the content. Imagine if viewers had been compelled to
produce their own television programs in the heyday of TV. In particular, critics such as
 1 Introduction to New Media 15

Jose van Dijck note that this activity is "immaterial labour"-unpaid work that is captured
and capitalized by the owners of the websites (van Dijck 2009: 50). Others, such as danah
boyd and Oscar Gandy, have remarked on the considerable potential for privacy invasion
by tools that encourage users to over-share through the use of default settings that are
too wide open and the creation of a false sense of community and privacy through the
requirement that users log in with a username and password (boyd 2008). Despite such
criticisms, these sites continue to be enormously popular, in large part because they serve
what seems to be a real need. Or, at least, people find them useful and entertaining.

Experiences
The use of digital computers and digital networks to create, consume, curate, and com-
ment on information continues, but new media technologies and the evolving human
practices that go with them have started to branch out into new realms. These new realms
can be best understood under the general rubric of experiences.
In highlighting this shift we have to acknowledge that there have always been "ex-
periential" aspects of the earlier Internet technologies and practices. For example, the
first YouTube video, an elephant in the zoo, is a record of someone's experience. But for
many years, the dominant activity and way of understanding the Internet has been about
information-converting it into digital forms, storing it, presenting it effectively, provid-
ing categorization schemes and search engines, and building advertising and other pay-
ment schemes to monetize that information. Sometimes the information is of interest to
large numbers of people (a news site, or encyclopedia); sometimes it is specific to a single
individual (your banking information).
This new phase does not eliminate all of those informational aspects but instead
layers on an experiential element. Sometimes these experiences are fantasy and elaborate
and highly produced-think of video games. These may form ongoing stories that are
developed through many iterations over a number of years. Or, they can be factual, triv-
ial, and captured in a second, only to disappear as soon as they have been shared, like a
Snapchat video with layered-on funny faces or similar filtered experiences in Instagram.
And, of course, they can be everything in between. Importantly, they are informationally
thin but experientially rich. The established players are trying to ensure that they remain
relevant, adding more real-time sharing, more filters, to their existing products. A grow-
ing number of platforms, including Instagram and Facebook, support video, 360-degree
video, and most recently live streaming video. The most dramatic of these experiential de-
velopments in recent years, the virtual reality headset, promises to take our digital media
experiences and make them even more vivid, more engaging, and more immersive than
ever before. We will return to a fuller discussion of virtual reality in Chapter 10, but it is
important at this point to mark the (sometimes blurry, to be sure) line between using new
media for informational purposes and using it for experiential purposes.

The Growth of the Internet

The Internet has become the world's second-fastest-growing medium, after mobile phones
(Figure 1.5). It is estimated that as of 17 November 2016, there were 3.68 billion Internet
users worldwide, having grown from 360 million users in 2000 (and 30.6 million users
in 1995), or by almost 400 per cent over a 10-year period (Internet World Stats 2016).
16 New Media

Table 1.1 indicates the number of Internet hosts worldwide. These are the servers and
websites that make up the content delivery system for the Internet. 14
The incredible penetration rates and growth for mobile telephones and the Internet
are blending in many countries, as more and more mobile phones are Internet-enabled.
Depending on how you define access (since many Internet services such as Twitter and
Facebook are accessible in some fashion through dedicated apps in so-called "feature
phones" or through SMS), one could use the mobile subscriber numbers in place of the
Internet numbers. If this is the case, the number of people with some access to the Internet
is approaching the entirety of the world's population (Figure 1.6) (ITU 2015).

8
world populc:t~<:f': _ _
---- --- ------
7
- - ---- ------

Qi 5
c.
0
2G
Qi
Q.
4
C
.Q
ea
3

2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016*

Figure 1.5 Mobile Network Coverage and Evolving Technologies

Source: Reproduced w ith permission of the Internet Telecommunicatio ns Un ion .

Table 1.1 Estimated Internet Hosts Worldwide

Years Estimated Number Annual Rate
of Internet Hosts Worldwide of Growth (%)
199 1-1 995 9,485,000
1996- 2000 17 1, 186,092 1,704
2001-2005 979,305,014 472
2006-2010 2,727,829,068 178
20 11-2015 4,693,090,724 72
Not e: Yearly fig ures are for January.
Source: Reproduced with permission of the Internet Syst ems Consortium, www.isc.org.
 1 Introduction to New Media 17

Percentage of households with Internet access

84.0 83.8
Almost two-thirds of house-
holds in the Americas are
- ,.
67.8
connected, compared with
half of all households globally. - -
64.4
52 .3
45.7 46.4
Almost 1 billion households
in the world have Internet ac-
cess, of which 230 million are
%
- - 41 .1
"
VI u
.;:::
in China, 60 million in India (tl
u VI
·o C"I

and 20 million in the world's -~ .l!l

& 15.4
-0
Cl) C:
·c..
jn
c..
Cl)
c..
E V, ea 0
-0
0 11 .1
48 LDCs. e
<( .0 a:; .::::: a:; VI

g[]
(tl
Cl) V, (tl
"iii > >
::,
LU i= u <(
Cl)
0 0
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Figure 1.6 Percentage of Househo lds with Internet Access

Source: Reproduced w ith permission of the Internet Telecommunications Union.

The Global Internet

In the 2000 US presidential election campaign, Democratic Party candidate Al Gore
(now a leader in raising awareness about global warming) made the claim that as
vice-president during the Clinton Administration, he had "created the Internet." Gore
was roundly criticized for this boastful claim, particularly as the collaborative nature of
the Internet meant that no single person could have invented it, let alone a high-profile
politician. Yet there is a subtext to Gore's claim that cannot be ignored. At the time of
its mass popularization in the mid-1990s, the bulk of the major initiatives that led to
the Internet's emergence came from the United States (including early funding from the
US military), its user base was predominantly North American, and the policies of the
Clinton Administration-such as its promotion of the National Information Infra-
structure (NII) and the Global Information Infrastructure (GII, modelled on the US NII)-
played a key formative role in the way in which the Internet evolved globally. Further, two
legitimate pioneers of Internet technologies, Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, later wrote
(archived later to a mailing list, called "nettime") that Al Gore should get some credit for
his early popularization of and support for the notion of the Internet (or "the information
superhighway," as it was then known) (Kahn and Cerf 2000). With the Internet so much
a part of everyday life these days, it is hard to imagine that it needed popularizing, but
there was a time, not that long ago, when almost no one had heard of the Internet or could
imagine how it might affect their lives. Those days are long gone.
Despite its US origins, the Internet today is globally diverse (see Figure 1.7). Of the
estimated 3.611 billion Internet users in June 2016, the majority were from Asia and
Europe, and the fastest-growing regions for Internet take-up are the Middle East, Africa,
and Latin America.
North America, with 8.9 per cent of Internet users, is no longer the dominant player
that it once was. This diversification has been growing for more than a decade, as the
regional Internet populations have come to more closely resemble their absolute numbers
18 New Media

More than half the world's population is not using the Internet
CIS
33.4%

58.1%
The Americas
35.0%

74.9%

Scale: 1 : 1,000,000

Figure 1.7 Percentage of Individuals Not Using the Internet Worldwide

Source: Reproduced with permission of the Internet Telecommunications Union.

in the world population figures. Although current statistics haven't taken the impact of
mobile phones into account, the rise of the mobile Internet, accompanied by high and
growing penetration rates for mobile phones in the developing world, suggests that mobile
phones will be a factor in growing access to the Internet around the world. As the use of
the Internet spreads beyond its origins in North America and Europe, two key issues have
been highlighted: (1) the "digital divide" separating rich and poor; and (2) the importance
of globalization as an economic and political force.

Digital Divide
During the late 1990s in the United States, the National Telecommunication and Informa-
tion Administration (NTIA) used the term digital divide in its "Falling through the Net"
reports on the differential access to networked personal computers. D igital divide has been
defined as "the differential access to and use of the Internet according to gender, income,
race, and location" (Rice 2002: 106). The term has also been important in the context of
globalization, in clarifying the extent to which, as the United Nations observed in 1995,
"more than half of the world's population lived more than two hours away from a tele-
phone" (Couldry 2002: 186). That has changed dramatically in the past 20 years, leading the
International Telecommunications Union to report that "Seven billion people (95% of the
global population) live in an area that is covered by a mobile-cellular network" (ITU 2016a).
Access to a phone-which could include borrowing or paying for access from a neigh-
bour who subscribes- is approaching the entire human population. In fact, there are 99.7
active mobile subscriptions per 100 people in the world's population (ITU 2016b). The
 1 Introduction to New Media 19

developing world is not far behind the global figures, at 94.1 per 100 people (ITU 2016a).
These numbers are somewhat misleading, however, as there are a growing number of people
with multiple subscriptions (two phones, a mobile service for a vehicle or other device, etc.).
In an overview of digital divide research, Norris (2001) proposes that it is import-
ant to distinguish between (1) the "global divide," or differential Internet access among
nations based on access to networked ICT infrastructures, computers, information trans-
mission capacity, local website hosts etc.; and (2) the "social divide," or the gaps within
nations in terms of access to the Internet as a means of social engagement. Critics of the
digital divide concept argue that inequalities related to new media involve far more than
access, but also include opportunities to participate effectively in online environments
(Gandy 2002). Murdock and Golding (2004) argue that because the computing hardware,
software, and skills required change so quickly, and opportunities to learn these new skills
are unequally distributed, inequalities in the digital environment continue to reflect other
sources of social inequality, such as those arising from income, occupation, or geograph-
ical location.
While these data provide considerable evidence of a global digital divide, they
nonetheless also highlight how the world's Internet-using population is becoming more
globally diverse. A good indicator of this is the change in the top 10 languages used on
the Web. While English remains the dominant language, accounting for 26.3 per cent of
languages used globally in 2016, Chinese has almost caught up (20.8 per cent in 2016). In
terms of growth, the most rapid adoption is among Arabic and Russian speakers. There
is also a long tail of languages, with sites like Wikipedia supporting hundreds of lan-
guages, and showing over 100,000 articles for more than 50 languages (Wikipedia 2017)
(see Figure 1.8). Some commentators have also looked at the balance between the lan-
guages available on the Internet and the population of speakers, and therefore who is
underrepresented in terms of content. Not surprisingly, English does very well in this
regard, and is the language of choice for almost 54 per cent of the top 10 million websites.
Chinese, with a large population of speakers but relatively fewer websites, does poorly,
with only 2.8 per cent of sites. The growth rate, however, is much higher for Spanish,
Chinese, Russian, and Arabic sites (Rotaru 2013).

Globalization and New Media

New media are often studied as part of one of the most widely discussed concepts in social
theory today: globalization. Globalization is a term used to both describe and make sense
of a series of interrelated processes, such as the rise of multinational corporations; inter-
national production, trade, and financial systems; international communications flows;
global movements of people and the increasingly multicultural nature of societies; de-
velopments in international law; global social movements (e.g., environmental activism);
the development of international governmental organizations, regional trading blocs, and
international non-governmental organizations; and global conflicts, such as the wide-
spread war on terror after the September llth attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon. While many of these developments are not new-trade and empire have
been features of the world for millennia, and evident in North America since Colum-
bus crossed the Atlantic in 1492- the speed, intensity, and interconnectedness of these
20 New Media

developments are seen by many as marking a new stage in human social development.
New media is central to debates about globalization and its impacts because it enables
borderless communication.
Globalization has turned out to be a key issue for social justice activists and scholars,
in particular since the infamous 1999 Battle in Seattle, which was a watershed moment for
both new media and activism in the sense that new media tools were widely used to both
organize and document those resistance movements. From that day in 1999-a protest
outside the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle-right through to the 2010
G20 protests in Toronto and the Idle No More First Nations movement (#IdleNoMore)
that took off in Canada in December 2012 and spilled over into other countries, the
role of new media has been front and centre for social justice activists. In fact, a whole
cadre of tech activists sprang up in the years after Seattle, creating sites such as (the
now defunct) Indymedia to share alternative news and tools like Crabgrass to enable
anonymous and easy facilitation of group discussions in private (Milberry 2009). 15 Some
would argue, however, that these hacked-together tools were supplanted by more com-
monplace tools such as Face book and Twitter, coupled with secure messaging platforms
such as WhatsApp and Telegram.
In the spring of 2011, we were reminded of this power when popular movements
for change in both Egypt and Libya were closely linked to the use of social and mobile
new media forms. The rise of the so-called Arab Spring was not solely due to texting and

-
English E I 985

Chinese I 771

Spanish cr::::J I 312

-
Arabic 1111 I 185

Portuguese I 158

Indonesia l 157

Japanese 00 I 118

Russia iiiii l 109

French u I 108

Germany :::::J 85

All the rest 897

I
I I I I I I I I I I I I

0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 1100
Mil lions of Users

Figure 1.8 Top 10 Languages on the Internet, 2017 (in millions of users)
Source: Internet World Stats (2017), www.internetworldstats.com/stat s7.htm. Copyright© 2000-2017.
Miniwatts Marketing Group. All rights reserved.
 1 Introduction to New Media 21

tweeting, but it gained power and agility via these tools. While some commentators, nota-
bly Malcolm Gladwell, have been dismissive of the link between social media and revo-
lution, others, such as Clay Shirky, have argued persuasively that its potential should not
be ignored. Both sides of this issue were debated by Shirky and Gladwell in back-to-back
issues of Foreign Affairs from January/February and March/April 2011. 16 Since then, the
debate has mainly been not whether or not to use social media, but how to best use it. For
the most part, online social activism is now accepted as a core part of the activist-and
political-playbook.
The Idle No More phenomenon from 2012 and 2013 was a turning point for main-
stream attention to online activism. It has been followed by cross-border events such
as Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter-events that either began or were greatly en-
hanced by their active use of social media. While older digital activism (such as the
events in Seattle in 1999) required dedicated "tech activists" who could harness the
power of the Internet by cobbling together tools adapted for other purposes, the latest
protest and activism modes are built almost exclusively on existing platforms such as
Facebook and Twitter. The latest twist on online activism and technology sophistication
has come more from the growing dependence on privacy-enhancing technology and
secure messaging apps, adopted to resist challenges of police surveillance and infiltra-
tion of the activists.
The Idle No More movement emerged as a call to action by a small group of First
Nations organizers from western Canada. They created a Facebook page and called for
rallies, protests, and "flash mobs" -impromptu gatherings coordinated by text message,
email, Facebook messages, and/or tweets-to protest, at first, what they regarded as at-
tacks on First Nations sovereignty in a variety of bills proposed by the federal government.
As with the earlier Occupy Wall Street (#OccupyWallStreet) protests, these initial Idle
No More events sparked attention and participation and quickly spread to other cities in
and outside of Canada. In addition, the grievances that prompted the protest movement
broadened to include a number of other issues-sometimes on purpose, sometimes by ac-
cident, sometimes against the wishes of the original organizers. This broadening of intent
was a source of criticism and also seen as a sign of a more diverse support base. New con-
stituencies of people, including non-First Nations people, added their voices to the online
and oflline activities. The spread of the movement was rapid and far-reaching, eventually
hitting Brazil and connecting with the concerns of indigenous people there. 17
The existence of easy-to-use and broadly available services such as Facebook and
Twitter allowed the organizers, largely social media-savvy but non-technical people, to
quickly launch a national movement, and facilitated the participation of affiliated and in-
terested parties from around the globe. This reliance on external third-party services does
bear some risk, however, as services like Facebook and Twitter have been known to shut
down sites or accounts that they deem in contravention of their terms of use.
Online social activism can have a dark side. Several commentators have pointed
to the role of social media in "radicalizing" young people, encouraging them to join
violent or revolutionary groups in their own and other countries. A smart social media
strategy is considered essential for groups such as ISIL, as they work to get their message
out to the world, recruit people to their cause, and raise money for their actions. The
short Internet video, the "meme," the animated GIF- all of these new media forms are
22 New Media

deployed for serious activist messages as much as they are for commercial or cultural
reasons. While the established players, such as Facebook and Twitter, have made con-
certed efforts to shut down the accounts of those who incite violence and hatred, there
seems to be a never-ending process of creating new accounts and new forms of reaching
out to people. And it is sometimes unclear what is legitimate political speech and what
is "going too far." In every part of the world, on every topic imaginable, the debates and
discussions, the recruiting and fundraising, the coordinating and planning all go on
using computers and networks. Politics, activism, and change are inextricably tied to
the Internet and d igital media today.

The Conduit and the Content

The development and popularization of the Internet was a catalyst in the process of con-
vergence. Through the Web, a rapidly growing number oflnternet users were able to access
a dramatically increased range of forms of digitized content (text, images, sound, video),
delivered across telecommunications networks, via their personal computers, which in-
creasingly became a single media platform able to deal with multiple media forms. This
process of technological convergence, or the bringing together of computing, communi-
cations networks, and media content, was matched by the development of convergent
products and services, and processes of industry convergence, or the range of takeovers,
mergers, and strategic alliances that strengthened links among the computing and IT
industries, the large telecommunications companies, and media corporations (Barr 2000;
Flew 2005: ll-2).
At the same time, early Internet content was frequently quite impoverished in
terms of the capabilities of the new media form. Indeed, the imperative to provide
content was often the problem, as it frequently led to the dumping of already existing
text online with little consideration of how such material was viewed and used differ-
ently from its print-based variants. The much-publicized early initiatives to digitize
the entire contents of the US Library of Congress envisaged not only a veritable army
of minimum-wage information workers undertaking endless document scanning, but
also an Internet where content was largely composed of straight liftings from print
media. One problem was, of course, download speeds: with most domestic users reliant
on 28.8-kilobyte-per-second modems for much of the 1990s, access to audio and video
was bound to be slow for many.
The development of the Web gave a renewed focus to the nature of the interface, or
the "front page" from which users accessed websites, typically through a web browser and
search engine. The quality of interface design draws attention to the nature of human-
computer interaction, which is fundamentally a consequence of technical design and
the computer programming aspects of the interface, but which can operate effectively
only when, as Anne Cranny-Francis observes, it recognizes "the cultural practices that
enable users to engage with the technology," since it constitutes the "hidden engine of
the user's interaction with the text" (2005: 120). The importance of interfaces to the
usability and, hence, the popularity of computers was apparent well before the advent
of the Web. The success of Apple Computers in the 1980s was strongly related to its de-
velopment of a graphical user interface (GUI) that, in simulating the environment of a