tailieunhanh - Misunderstanding the Internet

In the 1990s, leading experts, politicians, public officials, business leaders and journalists predicted that the internet would transform the world. 1 The internet would revolutionise, we were told, the organisation of business, and lead to a surge of prosperity (Gates 1995). 2 It would inaugurate a new era of cultural democracy in which sovereign users–later dubbed ‘prosumers’–would call the shots, and old media leviathans would decay and die (Negroponte 1996). It would rejuvenate democracy–in some versions by enabling direct e-government through popular referenda (Grossman 1995). All over the world, the weak and marginal would be empowered, leading to the fall of autocrats and the reorder-ing of power relations (Gilder 1994). More generally,. | Misunderstanding the Internet The growth of the internet has been spectacular. There are now more than 2 billion internet users across the globe about 30 per cent of the world s population. This is certainly a new phenomenon that is of enormous significance for the economic political and social life of contemporary societies. However much popular and academic writing about the internet takes a celebratory view assuming that the internet s potential will be realised in essentially transformative ways. This was especially true in the euphoric moment of the mid-1990s when many commentators wrote about the internet with awe and wonderment. While this moment may be over its underlying technocentrism the belief that technology determines outcomes lingers on and with it a failure to understand the internet in its social economic and political context. Misunderstanding the Internet is a short introduction encompassing the history sociology politics and economics of the internet and its impact on society. The book has a simple three part structure Part 1 looks at the history of the internet and offers an overview of the internet s place in society Part 2 focuses on the control and economics of the internet Part 3 examines the internet s political and cultural influence Misunderstanding the Internet is a polemical sociologically and historically informed textbook that aims to challenge both popular myths and existing academic orthodoxies surrounding the internet. James Curran is Professor of Communication at Goldsmiths University of London and is Director of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre. He has written or edited 21 books about the media including Power Without Responsibility with Jean Seaton now in its seventh edition Media and Society now in its fifth edition Media and Power and Media and Democracy. He has been a visiting professor at California Penn Stanford Oslo and Stockholm universities. James Curran was awarded in 2011 the C. Edwin Baker Prize for .