how do you assess the value of all this information you find on the Internet? How can you be…

how do you assess the value of all this information you find on the Internet? How can you be sure that it is reliable and credible? Also, I have heard the term “digital divide.” What exactly does it mean, and how do you think this divide could be bridged?

Hello,

I hear so many good things and am so fascinated with what you can do with the Internet. Finding all this information so quickly must make your life very easy. But please tell me: how do you assess the value of all this information you find on the Internet? How can you be sure that it is reliable and credible? Also, I have heard the term “digital divide.” What exactly does it mean, and how do you think this divide could be bridged?

Thank you for helping me to understand these issues!

Best regards,

Your friend

Resources: Week Three Readings and Videos

Write a 700-to 1,050-word letter in which you respond to your friend’s questions.

CHAPTER 2 ○ INTERNET��37

MASS MEDIA AND
THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

40
The Evolution of the
Internet

48
The Internet Today:
From Media
Convergence
to Web 3.0

52
Video Games
and Interactive
Environments

56
The Economics and
Issues of the Internet

66
The Internet and
Democracy

The Internet,
Digital Media,
and Media
Convergence
Starting a decade ago, the most famous mar-
keting campaign for mobile phones involved
a Verizon Wireless test technician wearing
horn-rimmed glasses saying “Can you hear me
now?” into his phone from various locations.
These days, the original purpose of a mobile
phone—a voice call—is no longer the main
attraction. Instead, the Blackberry, the iPhone,
and Google’s Android phones lead a growing list
of smartphones that feature options like mobile
broadband, Wi-Fi, texting, GPS navigators,
music players, touch screens, full keyboards,
cameras, and speech recognition. Mobile
phones today represent a “fourth screen” (after
movie screens, televisions, and computers) for
many users, allowing us to go online, watch vid-
eos, or take and send photos wherever we are.
We may be on the go, but now we aren’t discon-
nected from the mass media—we take it with us.

38��MASS MEDIA AND THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA,
AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE

The change in the technology and
culture of mobile phones is evident
in current mobile phone marketing.
When HTC released its Droid Incred-
ible smartphone for Verizon in 2010,
voice calls were hardly even a feature
worth promoting. Indeed, the only times
Verizon mentioned voice was in connec-
tion to the voice-enabled keyboard (so
users can speak their text messages in-
stead of typing them) and voice search,
which uses voice recognition to search
Google. The more important features
in the marketing campaign were the
powerful processors, the touch screen,
social networking ease, synced e-mail
accounts, Google Maps, the 8 mega-
pixel camera, and thousands of apps
and widgets from the Android Market
(similar to the iPhone’s App Store).

One of the latest entries, Motorola’s
Bravo (for AT&T) is a smartphone whose
design and features focus on Web
browsing and social networking so much
that most reviews don’t even address
the phone’s call quality. Instead, the
Bravo’s marketing efforts show off its
full HTML browser with Adobe Flash
Lite 3 (for a content-rich surfing experi-
ence) and a large touch screen (making
it better for watching video). The phone
also features MOTOBLUR, a service
that syncs your Facebook, MySpace,
and Twitter updates into a single feed.
However, given the fierce competition
in the market, it can be difficult to know
which of the many new smartphones
will be popular with consumers and have
lasting power.

This shift in marketing reflects a sig-
nificant trend: By 2009, traffic from
text, video, and other data surpassed
voice call traffic in mobile phone sys-
tems in the United States.1 Ironically,
the amount of data traffic on Apple’s
iPhones has swamped AT&T’s cellular
networks in major metropolitan areas
like New York, San Francisco, and
Austin, resulting in a chronic problem
of dropped voice calls.2

Despite occasional technological
pitfalls, smartphones contain more and
more functions and applications with
every new release. Along with comput-
ers, digital music players, and a new
generation of touchscreen devices like
the iPad, smartphones are part of the
general shift to media convergence in
media devices over the past decade. We
may be talking (on the phone) less, but
now we have other tools to communi-
cate the drama of our lives instantly.

“We may be on the go, but
now we aren’t disconnected
from the mass media—we
take it with us.”

CHAPTER 2 ○ INTERNET��39

THE INTERNET—the vast network of telephone and cable
lines, wireless connections, and satellite systems designed to link

and carry digital information worldwide—was initially described as

an information superhighway. This description implied that the

goal of the Internet was to build a new media network, a new

superhighway, to replace traditional media (e.g., books, newspa-

pers, television, and radio), the old highway system. In many

ways, the original description of the Internet has turned out to be

true. The Internet has expanded dramatically from its initial

establishment in the 1960s to an enormous media powerhouse

that encompasses—but has not replaced—all other media today.

Even with its tremendous growth, the full impact of the

Internet has yet to emerge. Unlike radio, television, and other

mass media, the Internet uniquely lacks technological limitations

on how large its databases of content can grow and how many

people around the globe can be connected to it. Unending waves

of new innovations and capabilities appear rapidly online. These

advances have presented both challenges and opportunities to

virtually every traditional mass medium, including the recording industry, radio, broadcast and

cable television, movies, newspapers, magazines, and books. With its ability to host personal

conversations, social networks, and multimedia mass communication, the Internet has begun

to break down conventional distinctions among various media industries and between private

and public modes of communication.

As governments, corporations, and public and private interests vie to shape the Internet’s

continuing evolution, answers for many questions remain ambiguous. Who will have access to

the Internet, and who will be left behind? Who or what will manage the Internet? What infor-

mation is private, and what is public? What are the implications for the future and for democ-

racy? The task for critical media consumers is to sort through competing predictions about the

Internet and new technology, analyzing and determining how the Internet can best serve the

majority of citizens and communities.

Why discuss the Internet before exploring the many traditional forms of media—books,

radio, television, and so on—that both preceded and shaped it? The answer is simple: We are

all witnesses and participants in the emergence of this mass medium. Because of this unique

vantage point, we are able to gain firsthand understanding of the factors that cause a medium

to evolve over time, and we can apply that understanding to the older, more established media

we’ll talk about in later chapters.

In this chapter, we examine the many dimensions of the Internet, digital media, and con-

vergence. We will:

• Review the birth and evolution of the Internet from Web 1.0 to Web 3.0

• Provide an overview of the key features of the Internet, including instant messaging, blogs,

and social knowledge networks

• Discuss the convergence of the Internet with other forms of media, smartphones, and

touchscreen technology

• Explore the world of video games, including online gaming and convergence, the economics

and effects of gaming, and the future of gaming technology

• Examine the economics and critical issues of the Internet: ownership, targeted advertising,

free speech, security, and access

As you read through this chapter, think back to your first experiences with the Internet. What

was your first encounter like? What were some of the things you remember using the Internet for

YOUTUBE is the most
popular Web site for
watching videos online. Full
of amateur and home videos,
the site now partners with
mainstream television and
movie companies to provide
professional content as well
(a change that occurred after
Google bought the site).

40��MASS MEDIA AND THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA,
AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE

From its humble origins as a military communications network in the 1960s, the Internet

became increasingly interactive by the 1990s, allowing immediate two-way communication

and one-to-many communication. By the 2000s, the Internet was a multimedia source for both

information and entertainment as it quickly became an integral part of our daily lives. For ex-

ample, in 2000, about 50 percent of American adults were connected to the Internet; by 2010,

about 80 percent of American adults used the Internet.

The Birth of the Internet
The Internet originated as a military-government project, with computer time-sharing as one of

its goals. In the 1960s, computers were relatively new and there were only a few of the expen-

sive, room-sized mainframe computers across the country for researchers to use. The Defense

Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) developed a solution to enable

researchers to share computer processing time starting in the late 1960s. This original Internet—

called ARPAnet and nicknamed the Net—enabled military and academic researchers to commu-

nicate on a distributed network system (see Figure 2.1 on page 41). First, ARPA created a wired

The Evolution of
the Internet

“The dream behind
the Web is of a
common informa-
tion space in which
we communicate
by sharing informa-
tion. Its universality
is essential: the
fact that a hyper-
text link can point
to anything, be it
personal, local, or
global, be it draft or
highly polished.”

TIM BERNERS-LEE,
INVENTOR OF THE
WORLD WIDE WEB,
2000

The Internet, Digital Media, and Media Convergence

E-mail
The process by which
electronic messages are
sent from computer to
computer on a network is
first developed in the early
1970s, revolutionizing
modes of communication
(p. 42).

NSF Network
In 1982, the National
Science Foundation
bankrolls a high-speed
communications
network, connecting
computers across the
country (p. 42).

1940 1950 1960 1970 1980

Digital Technology
In the late 1940s, images,
texts, and sounds are first
converted into “binary
code“—ones and zeros—
vastly improving the rate at
which information is stored
and reproduced (p. 45).

ARPAnet
The U.S. Defense
Department begins re-
search in the late 1960s
on a distributed com-
munication network—
the groundwork for the
Internet (p. 40).

Microprocessors
These miniature compu-
ter circuits, developed in
1971, enable personal
computers to be born.
PCs become increasingly
smaller, cheaper, and more
powerful (p. 42).

then? How did it compare with your first encounters with other mass media? How has the Internet

changed since your first experiences with it? For more questions to help you think through the

role of the Internet in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” on page 69 in the Chapter Review.

CHAPTER 2 ○ INTERNET��41

network system in which users from multiple locations could log into a computer whenever

they needed it. Second, to prevent logjams in data communication, the network used a system

called packet switching, which broke down messages into smaller pieces to more easily route

them through the multiple paths on the network before reassembling them on the other end.

Ironically, one of the most hierarchically structured and centrally organized institutions in

our culture—the national defense industry—created the Internet, possibly the least hierarchical

and most decentralized social network ever conceived. Each computer hub in the Internet has

similar status and power, so nobody can own the system outright and nobody has the power to

Fiber-Optic Cable
Thin glass bundles of
fiber are developed
in the mid-1980s,
capable of transmit-
ting thousands of
digital messages and
allowing broadcast
channels, telephone
signals, and other data
to go on the Internet
(p. 43).

AOL
The company is
launched in 1985,
becoming the most
successful Internet
service provider for
the next decade
(p. 44).

Web Browsers
The Internet
becomes navigable
with a user-friendly
graphic layout,
and by 1993 the
Internet is poised
to become a mass
medium (p. 44).

Broadband
By 2005, dial-up
Internet connec-
tions decline sharp-
ly as users switch
to cable modem or
DSL connections
(p. 44).

Online Gaming
In 1999, Sega intro-
duces the Dream-
cast, the first console
to have a modem.
It transforms video
games into an online,
multiplayer social
activity (p. 52).

1990 2000 2010 2020

Blogging
In 1999, Pyra
Labs releases
Blogger Software,
helping to popu-
larize blogging
(p. 46).

Net Neutrality
In 2010, a federal
appeals court rules to
allow Comcast to slow
its customers’ access
to the file-sharing site
BitTorrent, despite
fierce opposition from
the FCC (p. 51).

Blackberry
Introduced in
2002, the Black-
berry is the first
Internet-capable
smartphone to
catch on, allowing
users to check their
e-mail anytime and
anywhere (p. 49).

Game Center
Apple jumps into
the world of video
games in 2010
with the launch of
its Game Center,
where players can
connect with oth-
ers for multiplayer
games and keep
track of their
scores (p. 54).

Hypertext
In the mid-1980s,
this data-linking fea-
ture enables users
to link one Web page
to another, creating
the World Wide Web
(p. 43).

FIGURE 2.1
DISTRIBUTED NETWORKS
In a centralized network (a)
all the paths lead to a single
nerve center. Decentralized
networks (b) contain several
main nerve centers. In a dis-
tributed network (c), which
resembles a net, there are no
nerve centers; if any connec-
tion is severed, information
can be immediately rerouted
and delivered to its destina-
tion. But is there a downside
to distributed networks when
it comes to the circulation of
network viruses?
Source: Katie Hafner and
Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards
Stay Up Late (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1996).

(a) Centralized network (b) Decentralized network (c) Distributed network
Station

Link

42��MASS MEDIA AND THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA,
AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE

kick others off the network. There isn’t even a master power switch, so authority figures cannot

shut off the Internet—although as we will discuss later, some nations and corporations have at-

tempted to restrict access for political or commercial benefit.

To enable military personnel and researchers involved in the development of ARPAnet to

better communicate with one another from separate locations, an essential innovation during

the development stage of the Internet was e-mail. It was invented in 1971 by computer engineer

Ray Tomlinson, who developed software to send electronic mail messages to any computer on

ARPAnet. He decided to use the @ symbol to signify the location of the computer user, thus

establishing the “login name@host computer” convention for e-mail addresses.

At this point in the development stage, the Internet was primarily a tool for universities, govern-

ment research labs, and corporations involved in computer software and other high-tech products

to exchange e-mail and to post information on computer bulletin boards, sites that listed information

about particular topics such as health issues, computer programs, or employment services. As the

use of the Internet continued to proliferate, the entrepreneurial stage quickly came about.

The Net Widens
From the early 1970s until the late 1980s, a number of factors (both technological and historical)

brought the Net from the development stage, in which the Net and e-mail were first invented, to

the entrepreneurial stage, in which the Net became a marketable medium.

The first signal of the Net’s marketability came in 1971 with the introduction of micropro-

cessors, miniature circuits that process and store electronic signals. This innovation facilitated

the integration of thousands of transistors and related circuitry into thin strands of silicon along

which binary codes traveled. Using microprocessors, manufacturers were eventually able to

introduce the first personal computers (PCs), which were smaller, cheaper, and more powerful

than the bulky computer systems that occupied entire floors of buildings during the 1960s. With

personal computers now readily available, a second opportunity for marketing the Net came in

1986, when the National Science Foundation developed a high-speed communications network

(NSFNET) designed to link university research computer centers around the country and also

“A fiber the size of a
human hair can deli-
ver every issue ever
printed of the Wall
Street Journal in
less than a second.”

NICHOLAS
NEGROPONTE, BEING
DIGITAL, 1995

COMMODORE 64
This advertisement for the
Commodore 64, one of
the first home PCs, touts
the features of the computer.
Although it was heralded
in its time, today’s PCs far
exceed its abilities.

CHAPTER 2 ○ INTERNET��43

encourage private investment in the Net. This innovation led to a dramatic increase

in Internet use and further opened the door to the widespread commercial pos-

sibilities of the Internet.

In the mid-1980s, fiber-optic cable became the standard for transmitting

communication data speedily. Featuring thin glass bundles of fiber capable of

transmitting thousands of messages simultaneously (via laser light), fiber-optic

cables began replacing the older, bulkier copper wire used to transmit computer

information. This development made the commercial use of computers even

more viable than before. With this increased speed, few limits exist with regard to

the amount of information that digital technology can transport.

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, the ARPAnet

military venture officially ended. By that time, a growing community of re-

searchers, computer programmers, amateur hackers, and commercial inter-

ests had already tapped into the Net, creating tens of thousands of points on

the network and the initial audience for its emergence as a mass medium.

Web 1.0: The World Begins to Browse
The introduction of the World Wide Web and the first web browsers, Mosaic and Netscape, in

the 1990s helped to prompt the mass medium stage of the Internet. That first decade of the Web

is now often referred to as Web 1.0.

Prior to the 1990s, most of the Internet’s traffic was for e-mail, file transfers, and re-

mote access of computer databases. The World Wide Web (or the Web) changed all of that.

Developed in the late 1980s by software engineer Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN particle

physics lab in Switzerland to help scientists better collaborate, the Web was initially a text

data-linking system that allowed computer-accessed information to associate with, or link

to, other information no matter where it was on the Internet. Known as hypertext, this data-

linking feature of the Web was a breakthrough for those attempting to use the Internet. HTML
(hypertext markup language), the written code that creates Web pages and links, is a

language that all computers can read, so computers with different operating systems, such as

Windows or Macintosh, can communicate easily. The Web and HTML allow information to be

organized in an easy-to-use nonlinear manner, making way for the next step in using the Internet.

The release of Web browsers—the software packages that help users navigate the Web—

brought the Web to mass audiences. In 1993, computer programmers led by Marc Andreessen

at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois in

Urbana-Champaign released Mosaic, the first window-based browser to load text and graphics

together in a magazine-like layout, with attractive fonts and easy-to-use back, forward, home,

and bookmark buttons at the top. In 1994, Andreessen joined investors in California’s Silicon

Valley to introduce a commercial browser, Netscape. Together, the World Wide Web and Mo-

saic gave the Internet basic multimedia capability, enabling users to transmit pictures, sound,

and video. The Internet experienced extraordinarily rapid growth, and by 1994 the masses

had arrived. As USA Today wrote that year, this “new way to travel the Internet, the World

Wide Web,” was “the latest rage among Net aficionados.”3 The Web soon became everyone

else’s rage, too, as universities and businesses, and later home users, got connected.

The Commercial Structure of the Web
As with other mass media forms, the Internet quickly became commercialized, leading to

battles between corporations vying to attract the most users. In the beginning, commercial enti-

ties were seeking to capture business in four key areas: Internet service, Web browsing, e-mail,

and Web directories/search engines.

WEB BROWSERS
The GUI (graphical user
interface) of the World Wide
Web changed overnight
with the release of Mosaic
in 1993 (above). As the first
popular Web browser, Mosaic
unleashed the multimedia
potential of the

Internet.

Mosaic was the inspiration
for the commercial browser
Netscape, which was
released in 1994.

“The medium, or
process, of our
time—electric
technology—is
reshaping and
restructuring
patterns of social
interdependence
and every aspect
of our personal life.”

MARSHALL
McLUHAN, 1967

44��MASS MEDIA AND THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA,
AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE

Internet Service Providers
One of the first ways businesses got involved with the Internet was by offering connections to it.

AOL (formerly America Online), which began in 1985 and bought the world’s largest media com-

pany, Time Warner, in 2001, was for a long time the United States’ top Internet service provider

(ISP), connecting millions of home users to its proprietary Web system through dial-up access. As

broadband connections—which can quickly download multimedia content—became more avail-

able (about 64 percent of all American households had such connections by 2010), users moved

away from the slower telephone dial-up ISP service (AOL’s main service) to high-speed service

from cable, telephone, or satellite companies. In 2007, both AT&T (offering DSL broadband)

and Comcast (cable broadband) surpassed AOL in numbers of customers. Other national ISPs

include Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Earthlink. These are accompanied by hundreds of local

services, many offered by regional telephone companies that

compete to provide consumers with access to the Internet.

Web Browsing
In the early 1990s, as the Web became the most popular part

of the Internet, many thought that the key to commercial

success on the Net would be through a Web browser, since it

is the most common interface with the Internet. As discussed

earlier, the first browser to come on to the market was the

government-funded Mosaic in 1993. The next year, Andrees-

sen and several of his graduate school colleagues from NCSA

relocated to Silicon Valley in California and teamed with

venture capital firms to release Netscape.

In 1995, Microsoft released its own Web browser, Internet

Explorer; and within a few years, Internet Explorer—strategically

bundled with Microsoft operating system software—overtook

Netscape as the most popular Web browser. It continues to dom-

inate the Web browser business today. AOL purchased Netscape

in 1998, and today Netscape survives only as a minor brand of

AOL. Other browsers, such as Safari, Firefox, Opera, and Google

Chrome, offer alternatives to Internet Explorer.

E-mail
Another area of the Internet on which companies focused their

attention was e-mail. Because sending and receiving e-mail is

a popular use of the Internet, major Web corporations such

as Yahoo!, AOL, Google, and Microsoft (Hotmail) offer free

Web-based e-mail accounts to draw users to their sites, and

each has millions of users. All of the e-mail services also include

advertisements in their users’ e-mail messages, one of the costs

of the “free” e-mail accounts. Google’s Gmail goes one step

further by scanning messages to dynamically match a relevant

ad to the text each time an e-mail message is opened. Such tar-

geted advertising has become a hallmark feature of the Internet.

Directories and Search Engines
As the number of Web sites on the Internet quickly expanded,

companies seized the opportunity to provide ways to navigate

CHAPTER 2 ○ INTERNET��45

this vast amount of information by providing directories and search engines. Directories rely on

people to review and catalogue Web sites, creating categories with hierarchical topic structures

that can be browsed. Yahoo! was the first company to provide such a service. Yahoo! started as a

hobby to keep track of all the information on the Web. In 1994, Stanford University graduate stu-

dents Jerry Yang and David Filo created a Web page—“Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide

Web”—to organize their favorite Web sites, first into categories, then into more and more subcat-

egories as the Web grew. At that point, the entire World Wide Web was almost manageable, with

only about twenty-two thousand Web sites. (By 2008, Google announced it had indexed more

than one trillion Web pages, up from one billion in 2000). The guide made a lot of sense to other

people, and soon enough Yang and Filo renamed it the more memorable “Yahoo!” and started

what would become a very profitable corporation and an important player in the Web’s continu-

ing development.

Search engines, meanwhile, offer a different route to finding content by allowing users to

enter key words or queries to locate related Web pages. Some of the first search engines were

Yahoo!, which searched information in its own directory catalogues, and Alta Vista and Inktomi,

which were the first algorithmic search engines (searching the entire Web and looking for the

number of times a key word shows up on a page). Soon search results were corrupted by Web

sites that tried to trick search engines in order to get ranked higher on the results list. One com-

mon trick was to embed a popular search term in the page, often typed over and over again in

the tiniest font possible and in the same color as the site’s background. Although users didn’t

see the word, the search engines did, and they ranked the page higher even if the page had little

to do with the search term.

Google, released in 1998, became a major success because it introduced a new algorithm

that mathematically ranked a page’s “popularity” on the basis of how many other pages linked

to it. Users immediately recognized Google’s algorithm as an improvement, and it became the

favorite search engine almost overnight. Even other Web companies chose to use Google’s

search engine on their sites. By 2010, Google’s market share accounted for about 71 percent of

searches in the United States, while Yahoo!’s share was about 15 percent and Microsoft’s Bing

was about 9.5 percent.4

Web 2.0
The innovation of digital communication—central to the development of the first comput-

ers in the 1940s—enables all media content to be created in the same basic way, which makes

media convergence possible. In digital technology, an image, text, or sound is converted into

electronic signals represented as a series of binary numbers—ones and zeros—which are then

reassembled as a precise reproduction of an image, text, or sound. Digital signals operate as

pieces, or bits (from BInary digiTS), of information representing two values, such as yes/no, on/

off, or 0/1. For example, a typical compact disc track uses a binary code system in which zeros

are microscopic pits in the surface of the disc and ones are represented on the unpitted surface.

Used in various combinations, these digital codes can duplicate, store, and play back the most

complex kinds of media content.

Aided by faster microprocessors, high-speed broadband networks, and a proliferation of

digital content, the Internet has become more than just an information source in its second

decade as a mass medium. The second generation of the Internet, known as Web 2.0, is a much

more rapid and robust environment. It has moved toward being a fully interactive and collab-

orative medium with instant messaging, social networking, interactive games, and user-created

content like blogs, Tumblrs, YouTube videos, Flickr photostreams, and PhotoBucket albums.

It’s the users who ultimately rule in Web 2.0, sharing the words, sounds, images, and creatively

edited mash-up videos that make these Web communities worth visiting.

“When search
first started, if
you searched for
something and you
found it, it was a
miracle. Now, if you
don’t get exactly
what you want
in the first three
results, something
is wrong.”

UDI MANBER, GOOGLE
ENGINEER, 2007

46��MASS MEDIA AND THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA,
AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE

Instant Messaging
Instant messaging, or IM, enables users to send and receive real-time computer messages.

Although instant messaging can be used to facilitate conversations among coworkers or

family members, its most popular use has been as an extended social scene among students,

who log on after school and chat for hours with their friends. As such, instant messaging

foreshadowed the development of social networking sites, another important development

in Web 2.0.

Major IM services—many of which now have voice and video chat capabilities—include

AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Microsoft’s MSN Messenger Service, Yahoo!’s Messenger, Apple’s

iChat, Skype (owned by eBay), Gmail’s Chat, MySpaceIM, and Facebook Chat. IM users fill out

detailed profiles when signing up for the service, providing advertisers with multiple ways to

target them as they chat with their friends.

More recently, text messaging via cell phones has surpassed IM as the most popular

way to communicate with friends. According to a 2010 study, about 75 percent of twelve- to

seventeen-year-olds have a mobile phone, and 54 percent of teens send text messages to

friends daily. By contrast, only 24 percent of teens contact friends by IM daily, and just

11 percent e-mail friends daily.5

Blogs
Blogs, popularized with the release of Blogger in 1999,

are sites that contain articles or posts in chronological,

journal-like form, often with reader comments and

links to other sites. Ideally, blogs are updated fre-

quently, often with daily posts that keep readers com-

ing back to them. Blogs can be personal or corporate

multimedia sites, sometimes with photos, graphics,

podcasts, and video. By 2010, there were nearly

127 million blogs, the most popular topics being

personal accounts, movies/TV, sports, and politics.

Some of the leading blogs include the Huffington Post,

TechCrunch, Mashable!, Gawker, Engadget, the Cor-

ner on National Review Online, Think Progress, and

the local news/culture “ist” blogs such as gothamist

(New York City), chicagoist, laist, and bostonist.

Blogs have become part of the information and

opinion culture of the Web, giving regular people

and citizen reporters a forum for their ideas and

views, and providing a place for even professional

journalists to informally share ideas before a more formal news story gets published (e.g., the

New York Times hosts more than seventy blogs). Specialized search engines for blogs, such as

Technorati, BlogPulse, and Google Blogs, help to make sense of the blogosphere, where more

than one million blog posts are uploaded each day.6

Wiki Web Sites
Another Internet development involves wiki (which means “quick” in Hawaiian) technology.

Wiki Web sites enable anyone to edit and contribute to them. There are several large wikis,

such as Wikitravel (a global travel guide), WikiMapia (combining Google Maps with wiki com-

ments), Wikileaks (an organization publishing leaked sensitive documents by anonymous

whistleblowers), and FluWiki (a clearinghouse for influenza pandemic preparation); but the

“Twenty-four
percent of IM users
say they have
IM-ed a person who
was in the same
location as they
were—such as their
home, an office, or
a classroom.”

PEW INTERNET &
AMERICAN LIFE
PROJECT, 2004

HUFFINGTON POST, one
of the top blogs today,
aggregates the latest
news in a wide variety of
areas ranging from politics
and the environment to
style and entertainment.
Recently, the site launched
Twitter editions, gathering
the most relevant and
interesting Twitter feeds in
one place for each of the
site’s nineteen sections.

CHAPTER 2 ○ INTERNET��47

most notable example is Wikipedia—an online encyclopedia that is constantly updated and

revised by interested volunteers. All previous page versions of the Wikipedia are stored,

allowing users to see how each individual topic develops. The English version of Wikipedia is

the largest, containing more than three million articles, but Wikipedias are also being developed

in more than 270 different languages.

Although Wikipedia has become one of the most popular resources on the Web, there have

been some criticisms of its open editing model. In 2009, a Wikipedia contributor with the gobble-

dygook user name “Gfdjklsdgiojksdkf ” listed Senator Ted Kennedy as having died immediately
after his well-publicized seizure (the same user also put obscenities on soccer star Mia Hamm’s

Wikipedia listing). The misinformation was corrected by Wikipedia’s staff of volunteer editors

within five minutes. “Gfdjklsdgiojksdkf ” was quickly banned from editing Wikipedia pages, but

some Wikipedia vandalism may take longer to detect and many in the mainstream media contin-

ue to criticize Wikipedia’s open architecture as an invitation to inaccuracies and disinformation.7

However, a study by Nature magazine found that Wikipedia’s articles were sometimes

poorly written but only slightly less accurate than the traditionally edited Encyclopaedia Britan-

nica.8 Moreover, while Wikipedia is never a good primary source for research, it is often useful

as an overview of the many angles of a debate, particularly for complex or controversial issues.

Wikipedia’s entry on global warming, for example, details the scientific reasons behind the

changing world climate, but it also presents the viewpoint that the oil industry manufactured

the “debate” about global warming in order to maintain market share. Because all Wikipedia

pages are saved as history and because discussion boards can accompany any topic, it can also

be a place for people to air their grievances.

Social Media Sites
The do-it-yourself content of the Internet doesn’t end with blogs and wikis. A whole host of

social media sites like MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Hi5, Bebo, Orkut, and LinkedIn are

available, and have helped make social networking the most popular activity on the Internet.

“In less than three
years, the Inter-
net’s World Wide
Web has spawned
some 10 million
electronic docu-
ments at a quarter
million Web sites.
By contrast, the
Library of Congress
has taken 195
years to collect 14
million books.”

TIM MILLER,
NEW MEDIA
RESOURCES, 1995

FACEBOOK cofounder Mark
Zuckerberg demonstrates
how the social networking
site can become the hub
where all Internet activity
connects. You can post
news stories and YouTube
videos on your Facebook
page, and Web sites like
Pandora and Yelp have even
integrated with Facebook
to automatically share your
online radio stations and
location reviews with your
friends.

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MySpace, founded in 2003, was the first big social media site. In addition to personal

profiles, MySpace was known for its music listings, with millions of unsigned, independent,

and mainstream artists alike setting up profiles to promote their music, launch new albums,

and allow users to buy songs. Its popularity with teens made it a major site for online advertis-

ing. That popularity attracted the attention of media conglomerate News Corp., which bought

MySpace in 2005. But with competition from Facebook, by 2009 interest in MySpace was

waning, and the company laid off about 30 percent of its U.S. staff.

Facebook is now the most popular social media site and one of the fastest-growing sites on

the Internet. Started at Harvard in 2004 as an online substitute to the printed facebooks the

school created for incoming freshmen, Facebook was instantly a hit. The site enables users to

construct personal profiles, upload photos, create lists of favorite things, and post messages

to connect with old friends and to meet new ones. Originally, access was restricted to college

students, but in 2006 the site expanded to include anyone. Soon after, Facebook grew at a rate

of more than two million global users a month, and by 2010 more than 500 million active users

were posting more than sixty million status updates each day.

Another social networking tool—the microblogging service Twitter—has become a quick,

flexible counterpart to Facebook that can be accessed via texting, instant messaging, and the

Web. Each message (or “tweet”) is limited to 140 characters and generally offers a quick update

about what the sender is doing or thinking; a reply isn’t necessarily expected. Twitter users fol-

low the feeds of friends or celebrities—like Lady Gaga (the most followed Twitterer in 2010)—or

even businesses like CNN or Whole Foods.

Ning (for specialized social networks), Google’s Knol (a social knowledge network), and

Google Buzz (integrating Google services and Twitter into computer and mobile phone formats)

have emerged as the latest social media sites.9

The hallmark of the Internet today is media convergence, the technological merging of content in

different mass media. In recent years, the Internet has really become the hub for convergence, a

place where music, television shows, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, books, and movies

are created, distributed, and presented.

Media Convergence
First there was the telephone, invented in the 1870s. Then came radio in the 1920s, TV in the

1950s, and eventually the personal computer in the 1970s. Each device had its own unique and

distinct function. Aside from a few exceptions, like the clock-radio (popular since the 1950s),

that was how electronic devices worked. The advent of the Internet as a mass medium in the

1990s began to change that idea. Computers connected to the Internet allowed an array of digi-

tal media—text, photos, audio, and video—to converge in one space and be easily shared. Other

devices, like iPods, quickly capitalized on the Internet’s ability to distribute such content. Soon,

wireless networks meant that it was possible to access the Internet, and therefore a variety of

media, almost anywhere.

By the early 2000s, telephones and computers began to encroach on each other’s turf: cell

phones had enough computing power, applications, and hard drive space to rival a computer;

computers had the ability to make telephone calls, voice-only or with video. Today, computers

The Internet Today:
From Media Convergence to Web 3.0

“The increasingly
common habit
of sharing what
you’re thinking
(Twitter), what
you’re reading
(StumbleUpon),
your finances
(Wesabe), your
everything (the
Web) is becoming a
foundation of our
culture.”

WIRED, 2009

CHAPTER 2 ○ INTERNET��49

(whether desktops, laptops, netbooks, or tablets) and cell phones are the most popular digital

devices for online convergence, capable of storing or streaming books, movies, music, video

games, and any other form of digital media.

Media Converges on Our PCs
The rise of the personal computer industry in the mid-1970s first opened the possibility for un-

precedented media convergence. A New York Times article on the new “home computers” in 1978

noted that “the long-predicted convergence of such consumer electronic products as television

sets, videotape recorders, video games, stereo sound systems and the coming video-disk machines

into a computer-based home information-entertainment center is getting closer.”10 However, PC-

based convergence didn’t really materialize until a few decades later when broadband Internet

connections improved the multimedia capabilities of computers. Finally, by the early 2000s, the

computer screen had become a “home-information entertainment center.” Now, a user can access

television shows (Hulu and Fancast), movies (Netflix), music (iTunes and Pandora), books (Ama-

zon, Google), newspapers, magazines, and lots of other Web content on a computer. And with

Skype, iChat, and other live voice and video software, PCs are starting to replace telephones.

Media is also converging on our television sets, as the electronics industry begins to manu-

facture Internet-ready TVs. Video consoles like the Xbox, Wii, and PS3, and as set-top boxes like

Apple TV, Google TV, Roku, and Boxee also offer additional entertainment content access via

their Internet connections. In the early years of the Web, it seemed that people would

choose only one gateway to the Internet and media content. However, with increasing

media convergence and the recent technological developments in various media devices,

consumers now regularly use more than one avenue to access all types of content.

Smartphones and Touchscreen Technology
Mobile telephones have been around for decades (like the giant “brick” mobile phones

of the 1970s and 1980s), but the mobile phones of the twenty-first century are substan-

tially different creatures—smartphones can be used for activities beyond voice calls,

like sending text messages, listening to music, watching movies, and connecting to the

Internet.

The Blackberry was the first popular Internet-capable smartphone in the United

States, introduced in 2002. Users’ ability to check their e-mail messages at any time

created addictive e-mail behavior and earned the phones their “Crackberry” nick-

name. Convergence on mobile phones took another big leap in 2007 with Apple’s

introduction of the iPhone, which combined qualities of its iPod digital music player

and telephone and Internet service, all accessed though a sleek touch screen. The next

year, Apple opened its App Store, featuring free and low-cost software applications

for the iPhone (and iPod Touch and, later, the iPad) created by third-party develop-

ers, vastly increasing the utility of the iPhone. By 2010, there were more than 150,000

applications (apps) available to do thousands of things—from playing interactive games and

watching movies to finding locations with a GPS or using the iPhone like a carpenter’s level.

Indeed, iPhones now compete in a busy smartphone market that includes the Blackberry,

Google’s Android operating system phones (e.g., Droid Incredible, Bravo), HP’s Palm Pre, and

the Windows Phone 7.

In 2010, Apple introduced the iPad, a tablet computer that functions like a larger iPod

Touch, making it more suitable for reading magazines, newspapers, and books; watching video;

and using visual applications. The company sold over four million iPads in its first four months.

Interestingly, the greatest criticisms of the first-generation iPad centered on its limitations for

convergence: no camera, no multitasking, no wide-screen for video. However, improvements to

GOOGLE’S ANDROID
PHONES are proving
to be stiff competition
for Apple’s ubiquitous
iPhone. Americans are
now buying more Android
phones than iPhones,
which could diminish the
iPhone’s dominance in the
smartphone market.

50��MASS MEDIA AND THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

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AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE

allow for more media convergence in future generations of the iPad is likely, given the competi-

tion: In the same year, HP and Samsung readied major introductions of tablets, and Amazon

launched a few game apps, including Scrabble, for its established Kindle book reader. A big

question confronting many users is which size portable digital device and how many they really

need—a laptop computer, a mobile phone, a tablet, two of the devices, or all three?

Web 3.0
Many Internet visionaries talk about Web 3.0 as the Semantic Web, a term that gained promi-

nence after hypertext inventor Tim Berners-Lee and two coauthors published an influential

article in a 2001 issue of Scientific American.11 If “semantics” is the study of meanings, then the

Semantic Web is about creating a more meaningful—or more organized—Web. To do that, Web 3.0

promises a layered, connected database of information that software agents will sift through

and process automatically for us. Whereas the search engines of Web 2.0 generate relevant

Web pages for us to read, the software of Web 3.0 will make our lives even easier as it places

the basic information of the Web into meaningful categories—family, friends, calendars, mutual

interests, location—and makes significant connections for us.

One Web site that already uses some of the principles of Web 3.0 is Freebase.com, a

Semantic Web version of Wikipedia. Whereas Wikipedia presents an article for each topic, plus

relevant links, Freebase presents a smaller introduction to the topic that is then accompanied

by database fields that point a user in relevant directions and to increasingly relevant connec-

tions. A Freebase user might read an article about a film, then be connected to an article about

that film’s director, then to a list of all the films the director made, then to links to the director’s

parents and their associations, and so on. In Web 3.0, a computer—not a human—generates

these logical connections. The travel utility of the Bing search engine, which searches a number

of airlines and then estimates when prices will rise or fall, hints at Web 3.0 possibilities, as does

Wolfram Alpha, a computational search engine that draws on relevant databases for each query.

The Next Era: Faster and Wider Access
There is debate about what the next era of the Web will be like. Certainly, it will involve even

greater bandwidth for faster, more graphically rich 3-D applications. In fact, speed and avail-

ability will be critical issues in the Web’s future; applications will require even faster broadband

connections, and users will expect wireless connectivity available wherever they go. Higher-

speed fiber-optic systems like Verizon’s FiOS and AT&T’s U-verse and upgraded cable technol-

ogy by companies like Comcast, Cox, and Cablevision have increased Internet speeds in many

U.S. markets, but with prices tiered so that higher speeds cost more.

The National Broadband Plan (www.broadband.gov) sent to Congress in 2010 calls for at least

100 million U.S. homes to have affordable access to download speeds of at least 100 megabits per sec-

ond (mbps) in the next decade (this would be about twenty-five times the typical broadband down-

load speeds of today, and it would greatly improve streaming and downloads of data-rich content like

video). The plan also asks for an expansion of spectrum space to allow for greater access to wireless

broadband so people can have easier access to the Internet outside of their homes or offices.

Google gave its support to the national plan but used its leading position to go one step

further, vowing to build experimental all-fiber-optic systems that were even faster than the

National Broadband Plan model in several communities to demonstrate that it can be done.

The response to Google’s plan was overwhelming, with Google reporting that “hundreds of

communities and hundreds of thousands of individuals” expressed interest in the project. “If

one message has come through loud and clear,” Google responded, “it’s this: people across the

country are hungry for better and faster Internet access.”12 (For more on network access, see

“Case Study: Net Neutrality” on page 51.)

“You can never be
too rich, too thin,
or have too much
bandwidth.”

WALL STREET
JOURNAL HEADLINE,
2000

CHAPTER 4 ○ RADIO��51

F or every mass medium, there comes a pivotal time when society must decide whether
it will be a democratic medium or not.
Now is that time for the Internet. The
issue is called net neutrality, and it
refers to the principle that every Web
site and user—including a multinational
corporation or you—has the right to
the same Internet network speed and
access. The idea of an open and neutral
network has existed since the origins
of the Internet, but it has never been
written into law.

Major telephone companies and cable
companies, which control 98 percent
of broadband access in the United
States (through DSL and cable mo-
dem service), would like to dismiss net
neutrality and give faster connections
and greater priority to clients willing
to pay higher rates. These companies
claim that the money they could make
with multitier Internet access will give
them the incentive they need to build
expensive new networks. Ironically,
the telephone and cable companies
seem to have had plenty of incentive
in the past—they’ve built profitable
and neutral networks for more than a
decade. Their current drive to dispose
of net neutrality appears to be simply a
scheme to make more money by mak-
ing Internet access less equal.

One of the main groups in favor
of preserving net neutrality is
SavetheInternet.com, a nonprofit coali-
tion of more than one million people,

Net Neutrality
mostly bloggers, video gamers, educa-
tors, religious groups, unions, and small
businesses. Many large Internet corpo-
rations like Yahoo!, Amazon.com, eBay,
Skype, and Facebook also support net
neutrality because their businesses
depend on their millions of custom-
ers having equal access to the Web.
SavetheInternet.com outlined some of
the threats posed by an Internet with-
out network neutrality rules:

• Small businesses—The little guy will
be left in the “slow lane” with inferior
Internet service, unable to compete.

• Innovators with the next big idea—
Start-ups and entrepreneurs will
be muscled out of the marketplace
by big corporations that pay Internet
providers for the top spots on the
Web.

• iPod listeners—A company like Com-
cast could slow access to iTunes,
steering you to a higher-priced music
service it owns.

• Political groups—Political organiz-
ing could be slowed by a handful of
dominant Internet providers who ask
advocacy groups to pay “protection
money” for their Web sites and online
features to work correctly.

• Nonprofits—A charity’s Web site
could open at snail-like speeds, and
online contributions could grind to a
halt if nonprofits don’t pay Internet
providers for access to “the fast lane.”

The debate over net neutrality contin-
ues. In a 2010 case between Comcast
and the Federal Communications

CASE
STUDY

Commission (FCC), a federal appeals
court ruled in favor of Comcast, which
wanted to slow its customers’ access
to the file-sharing site BitTorrent. The
FCC wanted to stop Comcast from
doing so, but the court argued that
it did not have the power to regulate
Internet Service Providers under cur-
rent law.1 In response, Julius Gena-
chowski, the chairman of the FCC’
proposed reclassifying the Internet
as an essential telecommunication
service and reinstating FCC regulatory
authority over ISPs to ensure an open,
nondiscriminatory broadband network.

However, many are frustrated at Gena-
chowski’s lack of response to another
challenge to net neutrality in 2010—
Google and Verizon’s joint proposal
that supports regulations for wired
Internet connections (e.g., not allowing
ISPs to offer a higher cost “fast lane”).
But their plan exempts wireless and
mobile Internet connections, and future
new services, from those rules, which
still creates an Internet for the haves,
and an Internet for the have-nots,
going against the principles of net neu-
trality. Congress members, journalists,
technology experts, and the public are
calling on the FCC to denounce Google
and Verizon’s plan and make good on
their statements about keeping the
Internet free and open.

In addition, the SavetheInternet.com
Coalition is still petitioning Congress to
make a free and open Internet perma-
nent with the Net Neutrality Act.

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POPULAR ARCADE
GAMES in the 1970s and
1980s were simple two-
dimensional games with
straightforward goals like
driving a racecar, destroying
asteroids, or gobbling up
little dots. Today, most video
games have more complex
storylines based in fully
fleshed-out worlds.

Video games have their origins in electronic arcade amusements like the pinball machines first

popularized in the 1930s. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, large video games like Asteroids,

Pac Man, and Donkey Kong filled arcades and bars, competing side-by-side with the traditional

pinball machines. The story of video games might have ended there had they not transitioned to

three other formats: television, computers, and handheld devices.

The first video games were developed as novelties by com-

puter science students and electronics engineers in the 1950s and

1960s. Since computers were massive mainframes at that time,

the distribution of games was limited. German immigrant and

television engineer Ralph Baer developed the first home televi-

sion video game, called Odyssey. Released by Magnavox in 1972,

and sold for $100, Odyssey was based on analog technology and

used colored plastic overlays for the television screen and player

controllers to move light dots on the screen to play games like

tennis, basketball, skiing, and Simon Says.

In the same year, a young American computer engineer,

Nolan Bushnell, formed a company with a friend to develop

video games. They selected a Japanese game term for the com-

pany name: Atari. Bushnell’s company created Pong, a simple

two- dimensional tennis-style game with two vertical paddles

bouncing a white dot back and forth. The game kept score on

the screen, and unlike Odyssey, Pong was the first game to have

sound, making blip noises when the ball hits the paddles or bounces off the side of the court.

Pong quickly became the first big arcade video game. By 1975, Atari began successfully market-

ing a home version of Pong through an exclusive deal with Sears, and the new home videogame

business was secured.

A few years later, Bushnell started the Chuck E. Cheese’s pizza-arcade restaurant chain, and

he sold Atari to Warner Communications (now Time Warner). Although Atari folded in 1984,

plenty of companies like Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft followed its early lead and transformed

the computer and videogame business into an industry that now annually generates more than

$20 billion in the United States and $45 billion worldwide.13

In their most basic form, video games involve users in an interactive computer or online

environment playing toward a desired outcome. But these days, most video games go beyond

a simple competition like Pong: They can contain sweeping narratives with multiple outcomes,

imaginative and exciting adventures, and sophisticated problem solving. And when video games

crossed the threshold into having multiple players join in via the Internet, they became a form

of mass media.

Online Gaming
With the introduction of the Sega Dreamcast in 1999, the first console to feature a built-in mo-

dem, game-playing emerged as an online, multiplayer social activity. The Dreamcast didn’t last,

but online connections are now a normal part of console video games, with Internet-connected

Video Games and Interactive
Environments

CHAPTER 2 ○ INTERNET��53

players opposing one another in combat, working together against a common enemy, or team-

ing up to achieve a common goal (like sustain a medieval community). Some of the biggest titles

have been first-person shooter games like Counter-Strike, an online spin-off of the popular Half-

Life console game. Each player views the game from the first-person perspective but also plays

in a team as terrorists or counterterrorists.

The Internet has also diversified existing games. Football and music enthusiasts playing

popular video games like Madden NFL and Rock Band can now engage with others in live online

multiplayer play, while young and old alike compete interactively against teams in other loca-

tions in Internet-based bowling tournaments using the Wii.

The social nature of video games also made them a natural fit for social networking sites.

The most famous such game is Lexulous, an online crossword-style game that enables far-flung

friends to play against one another. The game, created by two students in India, was originally

titled Scrabulous, as it was inspired by the classic board game Scrabble. However, a copyright

infringement lawsuit from Scrabble’s owners briefly forced Scrabulous offline; but it returned

with its new name in 2008 and is one of the most popular games on Facebook.

MMORPGs and Virtual Worlds
The Internet also enables a fairly recent form of gaming: the massively multiplayer online

role-playing games (MMORPGs). These role-playing games are set in virtual worlds and re-

quire users to play through an avatar, their online identity. For example, in the fantasy adven-

ture game World of Warcraft, the most popular MMORPG with over eleven million players, users

can select from ten different types of avatars, including dwarves, gnomes, night elves, orcs,

trolls, and humans. In Second Life, a 3-D game set in real time, players build human avatars,

selecting from an array of physical characteristics and clothing, and then use real money to buy

virtual land and trade in virtual goods and services.

One of the biggest areas in virtual world games is the children’s market. Club Penguin, a

moderated virtual world purchased by Disney, allows children to play games and chat as col-

orful penguins. The toy maker Ganz developed the online Webkinz game to revive its stuffed

ONE OF THE MOST
POPULAR MMORPGs,
World of Warcraft was
first introduced in 2004.
Today, it has eleven million
subscribers worldwide and is
played in eight languages.

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THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA,
AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE

animal sales. Each Webkinz stuffed animal comes with a code for accessing the online game,

where players can care for the virtual version of their plush pets. These games not only are

fun to play but can be revenue sources for media companies that charge users to play. And

in a world where people expect everything online to be free, this is a noted exception. World

of Warcraft costs at least $12.99 a month to play, while some like Club Penguin and Dungeons

& Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited are free but charge extra for advanced play or special

avatar attributes.

Online role-playing games have helped to cement the idea of the Internet as a place of

convergence—World of Warcraft, for example, is now a comic book series, a quarterly maga-

zine, and a Sam Raimi–directed movie. The “massively multiplayer” aspect of MMORPGs also

indicates that video games—once designed for solo or small-group play—have expanded to reach

large groups at once, similar to traditional mass media.

Consoles, Handheld Devices, and Convergence
Through decades of ups and downs in the videogame industry (Atari closed down, Sega no

longer makes video consoles), three major console makers emerged (two of which, Microsoft

and Sony, were already major media conglomerates and thus well positioned to support and

promote their interests in the videogame market). Microsoft’s first foray into videogame con-

soles was the Xbox, released in 2001 and linked to the Xbox Live online service in 2002. Xbox

Live lets its twenty million subscribers play online and enables users to download new content

directly to the console (the Xbox 360, which in 2010 was the third most popular console).

Veteran electronics manufacturer Sony has the second most popular console with its PlaySta-

tion series, introduced in 1994. Its current console, the PlayStation 3 (PS3), has more than forty

million users on its online PlayStation Network.

Nintendo’s Wii, released in 2006, supports traditional video games like the New Super Ma-

rio Bros., but its unique wireless motion-sensing controller takes the often-sedentary nature out

of playing video games. Games like Wii Sports require the user to mimic the full-body motion

of bowling or playing tennis, while Wii Fit uses a wireless balance board for interactive yoga,

strength, aerobic, and balance games. Although the Wii has lagged behind Xbox and PlaySta-

tion in establishing an online community, it is now the best selling of the three major console

systems.

Videogame consoles, now in their seventh generation, work as part computer, part cable

box and are powerful media and entertainment centers. For example, Xbox 360 and PS3 can

function as DVD players and digital video recorders (with hard drives of up to 250 GB) and offer

access to Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and video chat. All three console systems offer connections

to stream Netflix movies, too.

Portable players like the top-selling Nintendo DS, released in 2004, and PlayStation Por-

table (PSP), released in 2005, are also converged gaming devices. Both are Wi-Fi-capable, so

players can interface with other DS or PSP users to play games or even browse the Internet.

However, while portable players remain immensely popular (Nintendo DS sold more than

130 million units through 2010), smartphones and touchscreen devices like iPads are catching

up.14 After years of relative disinterest in video games, Apple in 2010 introduced Game Center,

a social gaming network that allows users to invite friends or find others for multiplayer gam-

ing, track their scores, and view high scores on a leader board—things that the DS and PSP

do. With more than 86 million iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad devices in circulation, plus more

than 50,000 games (like Bejeweled and Angry Birds) available in their App Store, Apple has the

elements to make a big impact in the portable videogame business.15 Gaming on smartphones

will continue to become more prevalent, especially with Xbox Live access on Microsoft’s

Windows Phone 7.

“Originally, we
weren’t sure how to
market the [iPod]
Touch. . . . What
customers told us
was they started
to see it as a
game machine. We
started to market
it that way and it
just took off.”

STEVE JOBS,
SEPTEMBER 2009

CHAPTER 2 ○ INTERNET��55

The Economics and Effects of Gaming
By 2010, about 60 percent of U.S. households owned a videogame console.16 Although a higher

percentage of households have computers, console games (which play on the usually larger

screens of a television) and portable handheld games constitute 95 percent of the $10.5 billion

videogame market, while computer games are just about 5 percent of the market. The entire

videogame market, including portable and console hardware and accessories, adds up to

$20.2 billion a year.17 These days, the audience for video games defies the stereotype that gam-

ers are only young boys. According to the video and computer game industry’s main trade

group, the Entertainment Software Association, the average game player is thirty-five years old

and has been playing games for twelve years. Women constitute 40 percent of game players,

and 25 percent of Americans over fifty play video games. Almost 70 percent of American house-

holds play computer or video games.18

Beyond the immediate industry, video games have had a pronounced effect on media

culture. Games have inspired movies, such as Super Mario Bros. (1993), Lara Craft: Tomb Raider

(2001), and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010). A movie inspired by video games, Tron

(1982), spurred an entire franchise of books, comic books, and arcade and console video games in

the 1980s; and it was revived a generation later with an Xbox Live game in 2008, a movie sequel

(Tron: Legacy) in 2010, and a Disney television series. For many Hollywood blockbusters today, a

videogame spin-off is a must-have item. Recent box office hits like Avatar (2009), Transformers:

Revenge of the Fallen (2009), Up (2009), Shrek: Forever After (2010), and Inception (2010) all have

companion video games for consoles and portable players. Japanese manga and animé (comic

books and animation) have also inspired video games, such as Akira, Astro Boy, and Naruto.

Media culture, particularly the commercial nature of it, has had an effect on video games as

well. Like television’s infomercials, advergames are video games created for purely promotional

purposes. In 1992, Chester Cheetah, the official mascot for Cheetos snacks, starred in two video

games for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo systems—Chester

Cheetah: Too Cool to Fool and Chester Cheetah: Wild Wild Quest. In

late 2006, Burger King sold three Burger King advergame titles

for Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles for $3.99 each with value meal

purchases. One title, Sneak King, required the player to have the

Burger King mascot deliver food to other characters before they

faint from hunger. While the commercial objectives of the Burger

King games are clear, in-game advertising is often more subtle.

In-game advertisements are ads for companies and products that

appear as billboards or logos on products in the game environ-

ment, or as screen-blocking pop-up ads. In-game ad specialist

agency IGA claims to put “hundreds of millions of impressions

per week” in video games played on PS3, Wii, and Xbox 306 for

clients like McDonald’s, T-Mobile, Geico, AT&T, and Red Bull.19

One major concern about video games is their addictive-

ness. An infamous South Park episode from 2006 (“Make Love,

Not Warcraft”) satirized the issue of obsessive, addictive behav-

ior of videogame playing. Real-life stories, such as that of the

South Korean couple whose three-month-old daughter died of

malnutrition while the negligent parents spent ten-hour over-

night sessions in an Internet café raising a virtual daughter, bring

up serious questions about video games and addiction.20 In fact,

South Korea, one of the world’s most Internet-connected coun-

tries, is already sponsoring efforts to battle Internet addiction.21

SOUTH KOREA, one of
the world’s most wired
societies, is home to nearly
thirty thousand PC bangs, or
Internet gaming cafés. Most
of them are open twenty-
four hours a day and serve
food, giving their customers
no reason to leave. It is
estimated that these cafés
generate close to $6 billion
a year in revenue.

56��MASS MEDIA AND THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA,
AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE

Meanwhile, the game industry and others cite the positive impact of digital games, such as the

learning benefits of games like SimCity, and the health benefits of Wii Fit.

The Future of Gaming Technology
Gaming technology of the future promises both a more immersive experience and a more porta-

ble experience. The Wii system has been successful in harnessing more interactive technology to

attract nongamers with motion-controlled games. More motion-controlled gaming is expected,

with wireless controls to detect more of players’ body movements and even facial expressions.

One such system is Microsoft’s Kinect system, which uses a sensor camera to capture full-body

player motion. “You are the controller,” Microsoft’s slogan says, in advance of a late 2010 sched-

uled release date. The Kinect will also recognize players’ voices and faces, making on-screen

avatars more accurate likenesses of the players themselves. With Xbox Live, players will also be

able to interact in full video or avatar form with friends online.22

In light of Hollywood’s great success with 3-D movies, television set production and video games

have moved toward 3-D experiences, with PlayStation rolling out 3-D games in the summer of 2010.

Nintendo also plans on a 3-D version of its handheld Nintendo DS that doesn’t require special glasses.

Video games in the future will also continue to move beyond just entertainment. Games

already are used in workforce training, for social causes, in classrooms, and as part of multime-

dia journalism. For example, to accompany related news stories, the New York Times developed

an interactive game, Gauging Your Distraction, to demonstrate the consequences of distractions

like cell phones on driving ability.23 All these developments continue to make games a larger

part of our media experiences.

One of the unique things about the Internet is that no one owns it. But that hasn’t stopped

some corporations from trying to control it. Since the Telecommunications Act of

1996, which overhauled the nation’s communication regulations, most regional and long-

distance phone companies and cable operators have competed against one another in the

Internet access business. However, there is more to controlling the Internet than being the

service provider for it. Companies have realized the potential of dominating the Internet

business through search engines, software, social networking, and perhaps most impor-

tant, advertising.

Ownership and control of the Internet is connected to three Internet issues that command

much public attention: the security of personal and private information, the appropriateness

of online materials, and the accessibility of the Internet. Important questions have been raised:

Should personal or sensitive government information be private, or should the Internet be an

enormous public record? Should the Internet be a completely open forum, or should certain

types of communications be limited or prohibited? Should all people have equal access to the

Internet, or should it be available only to those who can afford it? With each of these issues

there have been heated debates, but no easy resolutions.

Ownership: Dividing Up the Web
By the end of the 1990s and Web 1.0, four companies—Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL, and Google—

had emerged as the leading forces on the Internet, each with a different business angle. AOL

The Economics and
Issues of the Internet

“One of the more
remarkable
features of the
computer network
on which much
of the world has
come to rely is
that nobody owns
it. That does not
mean, however,
that no one
controls it.”

AMY HARMON,
NEW YORK TIMES,
1998

CHAPTER 2 ○ INTERNET��57

attempted to dominate the Internet as the top ISP, connecting millions of home users to its

proprietary Web system through dial-up access. Yahoo!’s method has been to make itself an

all-purpose entry point—or portal—to the Internet. Computer software behemoth Micro-

soft’s approach began by integrating its Windows software with its Internet Explorer Web

browser, drawing users to its MSN.com site and other Microsoft applications. Finally, Google

made its play to seize the Internet with a more elegant, robust search engine to help users

find Web sites.

Three of the four major Web 1.0 Internet companies transformed themselves in the

rapidly changing era of Web 2.0 by buying promising Internet start-ups and constantly up-

dating their product. One of the companies from the Web 1.0 era, AOL, never recovered in

the shift from dial-up to broadband connections. AOL’s early success led to the huge

AOL–Time Warner corporate merger of 2001, but its technological shortcomings in broad-

band contributed to its devaluation and eventual spin-off from Time Warner in 2009. In-

stead, social networking giant Facebook emerged as one of the new top Internet companies

of Web 2.0 (see Table 2.1).

Google
Google, established in 1998, had instant success with its algorithmic search engine, which now

controls over 70 percent of the search market and generates billions of dollars of revenue yearly

through the pay-per-click advertisements that accompany key-word searches. Google also has

branched out into a number of other Internet offerings, including shopping (Froogle), mapping

(Google Maps), e-mail (Gmail), blogging (Blogger), browsing (Chrome), books (Google Book

Search), video (YouTube), and mobile phones (Android operating system). Google has also

challenged Microsoft’s Office programs with Google Apps, an online bundle of “cloud” word

processing, spreadsheet, calendar, IM, and e-mail software. Google’s most

significant recent investments have been its purchase of DoubleClick, one of

the Internet’s leading advertising placement companies, and AdMob, a mobile

phone ad placement company. (See “What Google Owns” on page 59.)

Microsoft
Microsoft built a nearly monopolistic dominance of the Internet through

the merger of its Windows operating systems and its Internet Explorer

TABLE 2.1
TOP 10 WEB PARENT
COMPANIES IN THE
UNITED STATES, 2010
Source: Nielsen NetView, June
2010

1 Google 158,496,000 1:57:35

2 Microsoft 135,305,000 1:54:57

3 Yahoo! 129,783,000 2:24:15

4 Facebook 122,337,000 6:43:22

5 AOL 80,065,000 2:03:56

6 News Corp. Online 76,866,000 0:51:58

7 InterActiveCorp 70,475,000 0:13:04

8 eBay 61,811,000 1:22:32

9 Apple Computer 61,158,000 1:12:40

10 Amazon 60,807,000 0:23:51

Average Time Spent
Per User (Per Day)
Rank Parent Unique Audience (HH:MM:SS)

SEARCH ENGINES are a
formidable force for the big
Internet companies because
of the advertising revenue
they bring in and because
they can create consumer
loyalty. (Do you always use
the same search engine?) In
2009, Microsoft introduced
its new search engine, Bing
(shown), as a competitor
to Google’s online search
dominance.

58��MASS MEDIA AND THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA,
AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE

browser software throughout the 1990s. Because of this, the U.S. Department of Justice

brought an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft in 1997, arguing that it used its computer op-

erating system dominance to sabotage competing browsers. However, Microsoft prevailed

in 2001 when the Department of Justice dropped its efforts to break Microsoft into two

independent companies. European Union regulators were much more aggressive in their

antitrust actions against Microsoft, ruling against the company in 2004 and levying a total

of about $2.5 billion in fines against Microsoft through 2008 after it found the company

proceeded too slowly in sharing interoperability information with other software makers.

Today, Microsoft’s presence remains considerable: The company continues to operate the

most popular Web browser (Internet Explorer) and also owns one of the leading free Web

e-mail services (Hotmail), a top Internet service provider (MSN), a popular instant messag-

ing service (MSN Messenger), a search engine (Bing), and an Internet-connected videogame

console (Xbox).

Yahoo!
After it was established in 1994, Yahoo! quickly grew into a major Internet property by dominat-

ing the Web directory portion of the market and, initially, the search engine portion as well.

Although its directory and search engine were eclipsed by Google’s, Yahoo! ranks as the third

most popular search site. After acquiring the key algorithmic search indexes Overture and

Inktomi in 2003, Yahoo! began to compete directly with Google and to aggressively market to

users by including sponsored links with search results. Collectively, Yahoo! sites—which include

Yahoo! Travel, Flickr, Rivals, Yahoo! Kids, and HotJobs—are the third most visited group of Inter-

net sites. Yahoo! also offers popular e-mail, instant messaging, and shopping services. In 2010,

Yahoo! bought Associated Content, a Web-content provider of text, audio, video, and images, to

increase its online offerings.

Facebook
Of all the leading Internet sites, Facebook is the “stickiest,” with users staying on the

social networking site an average of 6 hours and 43 minutes each day. Facebook’s large

audience (more than 500 million active users around the globe) for mainly a single service

puts it in a similar position to Google’s: It can leverage users by selling contextual advertis-

ing. Because Facebook users reveal so much about themselves in their profiles and posted

messages, Facebook is able to connect users’ social actions to advertisers in order to increase

ad relevance. For example, users discussing an upcoming wedding may see ads for wedding-

related services alongside their posts. In 2010, Facebook was still owned by relatively few

shareholders and small stakes held by Microsoft and Digital Sky Technologies, and it gener-

ated up to $2 billion in profits. As the Wall Street Journal noted, when Facebook decides to

finally sell stock to the general public, founder Mark Zuckerberg could become “the world’s

GOOGLE makes advertisers’
jobs easier by scanning e-mail
and matching up relevant
ads with key words in user’s
messages. For example, a
hotel confirmation e-mail for
your stay in Chicago might
be accompanied by ads for
air travel deals to Chicago on
the side.

“Despite Yahoo’s
huge audience of
more than 600
million worldwide
users a month . . .
Google and
Facebook have all
the momentum.”

NEW YORK TIMES,
2010

richest twenty-something.”24 Still, as a young company, Facebook has suffered growing pains

as it tries to balance its corporate interests (capitalizing on its millions of users) and its users’

interest in controlling the privacy of their own information at the same time.

Targeted Advertising and Data Mining
In the early years of the Web, advertising took the form of traditional display ads placed on

pages. The display ads were no more effective than newspaper or magazine advertisements

(despite the fact that they would sometimes blink), and because they reached small, general

audiences they weren’t very profitable. But in the late 1990s, Web advertising began to shift

to search engines. Paid links appeared as “sponsored links” at the top, bottom, and side of a

search engine result list and even, depending on the search engine, within the “objective” result

list itself. Every time a user clicks on a sponsored link, the advertiser pays the search engine

for the click-through. For online shopping, having paid placement in searches can be a good

thing. But search engines doubling as ad brokers may undermine the utility of search engines as

neutral locators of Web sites (see “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Search Engines and

Their Commercial Bias” on page 61).

Advertising has since spread to other parts of the Internet, including social networking

sites, e-mail, and IM—all activities in which computer users reveal something about themselves

and their interests. For advertisers—who for years struggled with how to measure people’s at-

tention to ads—these activities make advertising easy to track, effective in reaching the desired

niche audience, and relatively inexpensive because ads get wasted less often on the disinter-

ested. For example, Yahoo! gleans information from search terms, Google scans the contents of

Gmail messages, and Facebook uses profile information (age, gender, location, interests, etc.)

to deliver individualized ads to users’ screens. Similarly, a mobile social networking application

for smartphones, Foursquare, encourages users to earn points and “badges” by checking in at

business locations, such as museums, restaurants, and airports (or other user-added locations),

and to share that information via Twitter, Facebook, and text messages. Foursquare promises

to “unlock your world and find happiness just around the corner.”25 But by gathering users’

location and purchasing habits, Foursquare also operates as a consumer surveillance and data-

collecting database.

A related Internet security issue is the unethical gathering of data, or data mining. Mil-

lions of people, despite knowing that transmitting personal information online can make them

vulnerable to online fraud, have embraced the ease of e-commerce: the buying and selling of

products and services on the Internet, which took off in 1995 with the launch of Amazon.com.

What many people don’t know is that their personal information may be used without their

knowledge for commercial purposes, such as targeted advertising. In 2007, tens of thousands

of Facebook users protested when the site began tracking what members bought at affiliated

sites (like Travelocity.com) and then alerted their friends about those purchases. Facebook

relented and said it wouldn’t release online shopping information anymore without a

member’s approval.

One common method that commercial interests use to track the browsing habits of

computer users is cookies, or information profiles that are automatically collected and

transferred between computer servers whenever users access Web sites. The legitimate

purpose of a cookie is to verify that a user has been cleared for access to a particular Web

site, such as a library database that is open only to university faculty and students. How-

ever, cookies can also be used to create marketing profiles of Web users to target them

for advertising. Many Web sites require the user to accept cookies in order to gain

access to the site.

WHAT
GOOGLE
OWNS
Consider how Google
connects to your life;
then turn the page for
the bigger picture.

SEARCH
• Google Web Search
• Google Blog Search
• Google News
• Google Book Search
• Google Scholar
• Google Maps
• Google Images
• Google Video
• Google Earth
• Google Sky
• Ganji (Chinese language

search)

WEB SITES AND
SERVICES
• Blogger
• Gmail
• Google Chrome
• Postini
• iGoogle
• YouTube
• Knol
• Picasa/Panoramio

SOCIAL NETWORKING
• Google Buzz
• Google Wave
• Google Knol
• Orkut

ADVERTISING
• Adwords
• Adsense
• DoubleClick
• Feedburner
• AdMob

SOFTWARE AND APPS
• Google Docs
• Google Calendar
• Google Checkout
• Google Groups
• Google Talk
• Gapminder’s Trendalyzer

MOBILE
• Google Mobile
• Google Android
• Google SMS
• Google Latitude
• Google Voice
• Zipdash (navigation

assistance)

RADIO
• dMarc Broadcasting
• Maestro

Turn page for more

Even more unethical and intrusive is spyware, information-gathering software that is often

secretly bundled with free downloaded software. Spyware can be used to send pop-up ads to

users’ computer screens, to enable unauthorized parties to collect personal or account informa-

tion of users, or even to plant a malicious click-fraud program on a computer, which generates

phony clicks on Web ads that force an advertiser to pay for each click.

In 1998, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) developed fair information practice

principles for online privacy to address the unauthorized collection of personal data. These

principles require Web sites to (1) disclose their data-collection practices, (2) give consumers

the option to choose whether or not their data may be collected and provide information

on how that data is collected, (3) permit individuals access to their records to ensure data

accuracy, and (4) secure personal data from unauthorized use. Unfortunately, the FTC has

no power to enforce these principles, and most Web sites either do not self-enforce them

or deceptively appear to enforce them when they in fact don’t.26 As a result, consumer and

privacy advocates are calling for stronger regulations, such as requiring Web sites to adopt

opt-in or opt-out policies. Opt-in policies, favored by consumer and privacy advocates,

require Web sites to obtain explicit permission from consumers before the sites can collect

browsing history data. Opt-out policies, favored by data-mining corporations, allow for the

automatic collection of browsing history data unless the consumer requests to “opt out” of

the practice.

Security: The Challenge to Keep Personal
Information Private
When you watch television, listen to the radio, read a book, or go to a film, you do not need to

provide personal information to others. However, when you use the Internet, whether you are

signing up for an e-mail account, shopping online, or even just surfing the Web, you give away

personal information—voluntarily or not. As a result, government surveillance, online fraud,

and unethical data-gathering methods have become common, making the Internet a potentially

treacherous place.

Government Surveillance
Since the inception of the Internet, government agencies worldwide have obtained communica-

tion logs, Web browser histories, and the online records of individual users who thought their

online activities were private. In the United States, for example, the USA PATRIOT Act (which be-

came law about a month after the September 11 attacks in 2001 and was renewed in 2006) grants

sweeping powers to law enforcement agencies to intercept individuals’ online communications,

including e-mail messages and browsing records. Intended to allow the government to more

easily uncover and track potential terrorists and terrorist organizations, many now argue that

the PATRIOT Act is too vaguely worded, allowing the government to unconstitutionally probe

the personal records of citizens without probable cause and for reasons other than preventing

terrorism. Moreover, searches of the Internet permit law enforcement agencies to gather huge

amounts of data, including the communications of people who are not the targets of an investi-

gation. For example, a traditional telephone wiretap would intercept only communication on a

single telephone line. Internet surveillance involves tracking all of the communications over an

ISP, which raises concerns about the privacy of thousands of other users. (To learn more about

international government surveillance, see “Global Village: China’s Great Firewall” on page 62.)

Online Fraud
In addition to being an avenue for surveillance, the Internet is increasingly a conduit for online

robbery and identity theft, the illegal obtaining of personal credit and identity information

WHAT DOES
THIS MEAN?
Every Google product is
designed to keep you on
the Web. The longer you
browse, the more money
Google makes.

• Cost. It cost $1.84 billion
to run Google from January
to March 2010.

• Revenue. Google’s revenues
continue to rise ($23.6
billion in 2009), allowing
Google to invest heavily in
technological innovation.1

• Operating System. Google
created Chrome OS to
compete head-to-head with
Microsoft Windows. It also
keeps users constantly
online, making them
available for data collection
and targeted advertising.2

• Advertising. Advertising
provides 97 percent of
Google’s revenue.3 Nearly
every Web site holds a
Google ad slot, so every
second users spend on the
Web is revenue for Google.

• Market Value. In August
2004, Google shares were
first traded at an initial
price of $85 a share.4 In
2010, one share of Google
stock cost around $500,
more than six times the
initial price.

• Datacenters. Google’s
searches are run by
massive datacenters. It
is estimated that Google
operates about nineteen
datacenters in the United
States, twelve in Europe,
one in Russia, one in South
America, and three in Asia.5

• Employees. Google had
20,621 employees in
2010, almost 800 more
than in 2009.6 Google also
rents goats to clear brush
in the fields around its
Mountain View, California,
headquarters.7

CHAPTER 2 ○ INTERNET��61

in order to fraudulently spend other peoples’ money. Computer hackers have the ability to

infiltrate Internet databases (from banks to hospitals to even the Pentagon) to obtain personal

information and to steal credit card numbers from online retailers. Identity theft victimizes

hundreds of thousands of people a year, and clearing one’s name can take a very long time and

cost a lot of money. More than $12 billion worldwide is lost to online fraud artists every year.

One particularly costly form of Internet identity theft is known as phishing. This scam involves

phony e-mail messages that appear to be from official Web sites—such as eBay, PayPal, or the

user’s university or bank—asking customers to update their credit card numbers, account pass-

words, and other personal information.

Search Engines and Their Commercial Bias
How valuable are search engines for doing research?
Are they the best resources for academic information?
To test this premise, we’re going to do a search for the topic
“obesity,” which is prevalent in the news and a highly contro-
versial topic.1 DESCRIPTION. Here’s what we find in the first thirty results

from Google: numerous sites for obesity

research organizations (e.g., Obesity

Society, MedicineNet, WebMD) and

many government-funded sites like the

CDC and NIH. Here’s what we find in the

top-rated results from Bing: numerous

sponsored sites (e.g., the Scooter Store,

Gastric Banding) and the same obesity

research organizations.

2 ANALYSIS. A closer look at these results reveals a subtle but
interesting pattern: All the sites listed in

the top ten results (of both search engine

result lists, and with the important

exception of Wikipedia) offer loads of

advice to help an individual lose weight

(e.g., change eating habits, exercise,

undergo surgery, take drugs). These

“professional-looking” sites all frame

obesity as a disease, a genetic disorder, or

the result of personal inactivity. In other

words, they put the blame squarely on

the individual. But where is all the other

research that links high obesity rates to

social factors (e.g., constant streams of

advertising for junk food, government

subsidies of the giant corn syrup food

sweetener industry, deceptive labeling

practices)? These society-level views are

not apparent in our Web searches.

Media Literacy and
the Critical Process

3 INTERPRETATION. What does it mean that our searches are so
biased? Consider this series of connec-

tions: Obesity research organizations

manufacture drugs and promote surgery

treatments to “cure” obese individuals.

They seem to offer legitimate informa-

tion about the “obesity disease,” but

they are backed by big business, which

is interested in selling more junk food

(not taking social responsibility) and

then promoting drugs to treat people’s

obesity problems. These wealthy sites

can pay for placement through Search

Engine Optimizer firms (which work re-

lentlessly to outsmart Google’s page rank

algorithm) and by promoting themselves

through various marketing channels to

ensure their popularity—Google ranks

pages by popularity). With the exception

of Wikipedia, which is so interlinked it

usually ranks high in search engines,

search results today are skewed toward

big business. Money speaks.

4 EVALUATION. Commercial search engines have evolved
to be much like the commercial mass

media: They tend to reflect the corporate

perspective that finances them. This

does not bode well for the researcher,

who is interested in many angles of a

single issue. Controversy is at the heart

of every important research question.

5 ENGAGEMENT. What to do? Start by including the word
controversy next to the search term, as

in “obesity and controversy.” Or learn

about where alternative information

sources exist on the Web. A search for

“obesity” on the independent media

publications AlterNet, MediaChannel,

Common Dreams, and Salon, for ex-

ample, and nonprofit digital archives like

ibiblio and INFOMINE, will offer count-

less other perspectives to the obesity

epidemic. Let’s also not dismiss Wiki-

pedia, a collaboratively built nonprofit

encyclopedia that often lays out the con-

troversies within a given research topic

and can be a helpful launching pad for

scholarly research. Good research does

not mean clicking on the first link on a

search engine list; it involves knowing

that every topic has political, economic,

and ideological biases, and looking for

valuable and diverse perspectives.

62��SOUNDS & IMAGES

V isionaries of the Internet have long heralded the new online world as one without traditional
geographic, political, or legal limits.
Media theorist Marshall McLuhan
wrote in 1972 that “the wired planet
has no boundaries and no monopolies
of knowledge.”1 In 2000, Microsoft
leader Bill Gates said, “The Internet is
a constantly changing global network
that knows no borders.”2

But as the Internet has matured and
global communications have grown
more widespread, the real, political
borders of nations are making them-
selves known. This trend became
most evident with the operation of the
Internet in China. Over 384 million
Chinese are online—less than a third
of the country’s population of 1.34
billion, but constituting enough In-
ternet users to be the world’s largest
online population. However, in rapidly
modernizing China, where for decades
the Communist Party has tightly
controlled mass communication, the
openness of the Internet has led to a
clash of cultures.

As more and more Chinese citizens
take to the Internet, an estimated
thirty thousand government censors
monitor or even block their use of Web
pages, blogs, chat rooms, and e-mails.
This surveillance constitutes what
some now call the “Great Firewall of
China.” Many Chinese Internet service
providers and Webmasters learn to
self-censor to avoid attracting atten-
tion. For those who persist in practic-
ing “subversive” free speech, there
can be severe penalties: Paris-based
Reporters without Borders (www.rsf
.org) reports that thirty journalists and
seventy-two netizens are in Chinese
prisons for writing articles and blogs
that criticized the government.

China’s Great Firewall
Reporters without Borders also states
that the promises for a more open
Internet made by the Chinese regime at
the time of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing
have not come to pass. Instead, govern-
ment surveillance and crackdowns re-
main commonplace. For example,
in 2009 China blocked
Internet news about the
twentieth anniver-
sary of the govern-
ment’s violent
suppression of
student protest-
ers at Tiananmen
Square. “A dozen
websites such as
Twitter, YouTube,
Bing, Flickr, Opera,
Live, WordPress, and
Blogger were blocked,”
Reporters without Borders
notes. “The information blackout has
been so well enforced for the last 20
years that the vast majority of young Chi-
nese citizens are not even aware that the
events of June 1989 ever happened.”3

U.S. Internet corporations like Yahoo!,
Google, and Microsoft were eager to
establish a foothold in the massive Chi-
nese market and promote the liberating
possibilities of the Internet. Yet in much-
criticized decisions, all three companies
censored information to appease Chi-
nese authorities. For example, in 2006
Google created a new search engine
for China, Google.cn, that filtered out
offending sites, including many relating
to Tibetan independence, the Tianan-
men Square massacre, the Falun Gong
religion, and even BBC News. Moreover,
the Google.cn site stripped away e-mail
and blog features because they might
be used for political protest.

In January 2010, Google announced it
would stop censoring searches on its

GLOBAL
VILLAGE

Google China (www.google.cn) Web site,
even if doing so jeopardized its business
there. Google also reported that it and
more than twenty other companies from
the United States had been victims of
Internet surveillance from China, and

that one goal of the attackers was to
infiltrate the Gmail accounts

of Chinese human rights
advocates. Google

automatically redi-
rected its Chinese
search service to its
uncensored service
in Hong Kong (www
.google.com.hk),
while mainland China

continued to block us-
ers from several Google

services. However, in
July 2010, China renewed

Google’s license to operate after
Google appeased the Chinese authori-
ties by abandoning the auto-direct and
placing an image of their search box on
Google.cn, which when clicked on, takes
users to Google.com.hk.

China isn’t the only country to impose
borders on the Internet. As the OpenNet
Initiative reports, the governments of
Burma, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tuni-
sia, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan,
Vietnam, and Yemen are among those
also conducting extensive Internet filter-
ing.4 While governments may impose
virtual borders on the Internet, attempts
by any country to block free speech on
the medium may ultimately be futile. As
major U.S. Internet firms yield to the gov-
ernment’s repressive rules, hundreds of
thousands of Chinese citizens are bravely
evading them, using free services like
Hushmail, Tor, Freegate, and Ultrasurf
(the latter two produced by Chinese im-
migrants in the United States) to break
through China’s “Great Firewall.”

CHAPTER 2 ○ INTERNET��63

Appropriateness: What Should Be Online?
The question of what constitutes appropriate content has been part of the story of most mass

media, from debates over the morality of lurid pulp fiction books in the nineteenth century

to arguments over the appropriateness of racist, sexist, and homophobic content in films

and music. Although it is not the only material to come under intense scrutiny, most of the

debate about appropriate media content, despite the medium, has centered on sexually

explicit imagery.

As has always been the case, eliminating some forms of sexual content from books, films,

television, and other media remains a top priority for many politicians and public interest

groups. So it should not be surprising that public objection to indecent and obscene Internet

content has led to various legislative efforts to tame the Web. Although the Communications

Decency Act of 1996 and the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 were both judged unconstitu-

tional, the Children’s Internet Protection Act of 2000 was passed and upheld in 2003. This act

requires schools and libraries that receive federal funding for Internet access to use software

that filters out any visual content deemed obscene, pornographic, or harmful to minors, un-

less disabled at the request of adult users. Regardless of new laws, pornography continues to

flourish on commercial sites, individuals’ blogs, and social networking pages. As the American

Library Association notes, there is “no filtering technology that will block out all illegal content,

but allow access to constitutionally protected materials.”27

Although the “back alleys of sex” on the Internet have caused considerable public concern,

Internet sites that carry potentially dangerous information (e.g., bomb building instructions,

hate speech) have also incited calls for Internet censorship, particularly after the terrorist at-

tacks of September 11, 2001, and several tragic school shooting incidents. Nevertheless, many

others—fearing that government regulation of speech would inhibit freedom of expression in a

democratic society—want the Web to be completely unregulated.

Access: The Fight to Prevent a Digital Divide
A key economic issue related to the Internet is whether the cost of purchasing a personal com-

puter and paying for Internet services will undermine equal access. Coined to echo the term

economic divide (the disparity of wealth between the rich and poor), the term digital divide

refers to the growing contrast between the “information haves,” those who can afford to pur-

chase computers and pay for Internet services, and the “information have-nots,” those who

may not be able to afford a computer or pay for Internet services.

Although about 75 percent of U.S. households are connected to the Internet, there are big

gaps in access, particularly in terms of age and education. For example, a 2009 study found that

only 45 percent of Americans ages seventy to seventy-five go online, compared with 78 percent

ages fifty to fifty-four, 87 percent ages thirty to thirty-four, and 89 percent ages eighteen to

twenty-four. Education has an even more pronounced effect: Only 38 percent of those who did

not graduate from high school have Internet access, compared with 67 percent of high school

graduates and 93 percent of college graduates.28

Another digital divide has developed in the United States as Americans have switched over

from slow dial-up connections to high-speed broadband service. By 2010, 64 percent of all

Internet users in the United States had broadband connections, but given that prices are tiered

so that the higher the speed of service the more it cost, those in lower-income households were

much less likely to have high-speed service. A Pew Internet & American Life Project concluded

that American adults split into three groups—“the truly offline (29% of American adults); those

with relatively modest connections, intermittent users, and non-users who live with Internet

users (24%); and the highly wired broadband elite (47%).”29

“[The Internet]
is a way for . . .
the struggle in
our country, and
the many other
countries where
there are a lot
of human rights
abuses, to be
brought out into
the open.”

JANAI ROBERT
ORINA, KENYAN
HUMAN RIGHTS
WORKER, 1998

64��MASS MEDIA AND THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA,
AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE

One way of avoiding the digital divide is to make Internet access available in public

libraries. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been the leading advocate for providing

networked computers in libraries since 1997. Now that 99 percent of public libraries in the

United States offer Internet access, the main goal is to increase the number of computers in

those libraries. Many government documents, much medical information, and other re-

search data now exist solely online, so public libraries serve an important public function

for assisting all customers and helping to close the digital divide for those who lack Internet

access.

The rising use of smartphones is also helping to narrow the digital divide, particularly

along racial lines. In the United States, African American families generally have lagged behind

whites in home access to the Internet, which requires a computer and broadband access.

However, the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported that African Americans are the

most active users of mobile Internet devices. Thus, the report concluded, “the digital divide

between African Americans and white Americans diminishes when mobile use is taken into

account.”30

Globally, though, the have-nots face an even greater obstacle crossing the digital divide.

Although the Web claims to be worldwide, the most economically powerful countries like the

United States, Sweden, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the United Kingdom account for most

of its international flavor. In nations such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Myanmar (Burma),

the governments permit limited or no access to the Web. In other countries, an inadequate

telecommunications infrastructure hampers access to the Internet. And in underdeveloped

countries, phone lines and computers are almost nonexistent. For example, in Sierra Leone, a

NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE,
founder of the Media Lab
at MIT, began a project
to provide $100 laptops
to children in developing
countries (shown). These
laptops, the first supply
of which was funded by
Negroponte, need to survive
in rural environments
where challenges include
battling adverse weather
conditions (dust and high
heat) and providing reliable
power, Internet access, and
maintenance.

“In Africa, there
is only one fixed
broadband
subscriber for
every 1,000
people.”

INTERNATIONAL TELE-
COMMUNICATIONS
UNION, 2009

CHAPTER 2 ○ INTERNET��65

nation of about six million in West Africa with poor public utilities and intermittent electrical

service, only about ten thousand people—about 0.16 percent of the population—are Internet

users.31 However, as mobile phones become more popular in the developing world, they could

provide one remedy to the global digital divide.

Even as the Internet matures and becomes more accessible, wealthy users are still more

able to buy higher levels of privacy and faster speeds of Internet access than other users.

Whereas traditional media made the same information available to everyone who owned a

radio or a TV set, the Internet creates economic tiers and classes of service. Policy groups,

media critics, and concerned citizens continue to debate the implications of the digital divide,

valuing the equal opportunity to acquire knowledge.

Alternative Voices
Independent programmers continue to invent new ways to use the Internet and communi-

cate over it. While some of their innovations have remained free of corporate control, others

have been taken over by commercial interests. Despite commercial buyouts, however, the

pioneering spirit of the Internet’s independent early days endures; the Internet continues to

be a participatory medium where anyone can be involved. Two of the most prominent areas

in which alternative voices continue to flourish relate to open-source software and digital

archiving.

Open-Source Software
Microsoft has long been the dominant software corporation of the digital age, but indepen-

dent software creators persist in developing alternatives. One of the best examples of this

is the continued development of open-source software. In the early days of computer

code writing, amateur programmers developed software on the principle that it was a

collective effort. Programmers openly shared program source codes and their ideas to

upgrade and improve programs. Beginning in the 1970s, Microsoft put an end to much of

this activity by transforming software development into a business in which programs

were developed privately and users were required to pay for both the software and its

periodic upgrades.

However, programmers are still developing noncommercial, open-source software, if on

a more limited scale. One open-source operating system, Linux, was established in 1991 by

Linus Torvalds, a twenty-one-year-old student at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Since

the establishment of Linux, professional computer programmers and hobbyists alike around

the world have participated in improving it, creating a sophisticated software system that

even Microsoft has acknowledged is a credible alternative to expensive commercial programs.

Linux can operate across disparate platforms, and companies such as IBM, Dell, and Sun

Microsystems, as well as other corporations and governmental organizations, have developed

applications and systems that run on it. Still, the greatest impact of Linux is not evident on the

desktop screens of everyday computer users but in the operation of behind-the-scenes com-

puter servers.

Digital Archiving
Librarians have worked tirelessly to build nonprofit digital archives that exist outside of any

commercial system in order to preserve libraries’ tradition of open access to information.

One of the biggest and most impressive digital preservation initiatives is the Internet Archive,

established in 1996. The Internet Archive aims to ensure that researchers, historians, schol-

ars, and all citizens have universal access to human knowledge—that is, everything that’s

66��MASS MEDIA AND THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA,
AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE

Throughout the twentieth century, Americans closely examined emerging mass media for their

potential contributions to democracy. As radio became more affordable in the 1920s and 1930s,

we hailed the medium for its ability to reach and entertain even the poorest Americans caught

in the Great Depression. When television developed in the 1950s and 1960s, it also held prom-

ise as a medium that could reach everyone, including those who were illiterate or cut off from

printed information. Despite continuing concerns over the digital divide, many have praised

the Internet for its democratic possibilities. Some advocates even tout the Internet as the most

democratic social network ever conceived.

The biggest threat to the Internet’s democratic potential may well be its increasing com-

mercialization. Similar to what happened with radio and television, the growth of commercial

“channels” on the Internet has far outpaced the emergence of viable nonprofit channels, as

fewer and fewer corporations have gained more and more control. The passage of the 1996

Telecommunications Act cleared the way for cable TV systems, computer firms, and telephone

companies to merge their interests and become even larger commercial powers. Although there

was a great deal of buzz about lucrative Internet start-ups in the 1990s, it has been large corpo-

rations such as Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo!, and Google that have weathered the low points of the

dot-com economy and maintained a controlling hand.

The Internet
and Democracy

“You. Yes, you.
You control the
Information Age.
Welcome to your
world.”

TIME MAGAZINE’S
“PERSON OF THE YEAR”
COVER, 2006, FEATUR-
ING A MIRROR THAT
WAS SUPPOSED TO
MAKE EVERY READER
FEEL SPECIAL

digital: text, moving images, audio, software, and more than eighty-five billion archived Web

pages reaching back to the earliest days of the Internet. The archive is growing at staggering

rates as the general public and partners such as the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress

upload cultural artifacts. For example, the Internet Archive stores sixty-five thousand live

music concerts, including performances by Jack Johnson, the Grateful Dead, and the Smash-

ing Pumpkins.

The archive has also partnered with the Open Content Alliance to digitize every book in

the public domain (generally, those published before 1922). This book-scanning effort is the

nonprofit alternative to Google’s “Google Book Search” program, which, beginning in 2004,

has scanned books from the New York Public Library as well as the libraries of Harvard, Stan-

ford, and the University of Michigan despite many books’ copyright status. Google pays to scan

each book (which can cost up to $30 in labor) and then includes book contents in its search

results, significantly adding to the usefulness and value of its search engine. Since Google

forbids other commercial search engines from accessing the scanned material, the deal has the

library community concerned. “Scanning the great libraries is a wonderful idea,” says Brewster

Kahle, head of the Internet Archive, “but if only one corporation controls access to this digital

collection, we’ll have handed too much control to a private entity.”32 Under the terms of the

Open Content Alliance, all search engines, including Google, will have access to the Alliance’s

ever-growing repository of scanned books. Media activist David Bollier has likened open access

initiatives to an information “commons,” underscoring the idea that the public collectively

owns (or should own) certain public resources, like airwaves, the Internet, and public spaces

(such as parks). “Libraries are one of the few, if not the key, public institutions defending popu-

lar access and sharing of information as a right of all citizens, not just those who can afford

access,” Bollier says.33

CHAPTER 2 ○ INTERNET��67

About three-quarters of households in the United States are now linked to the Internet, thus

greatly increasing its democratic possibilities but also tempting commercial interests to gain

even greater control over it and intensifying problems for agencies trying to regulate it. If the

histories of other media are any predictor, it seems realistic to expect that the Internet’s poten-

tial for widespread use by all could be partially preempted by narrower commercial interests.

As media economist Douglas Gomery warns, “Technology alone does not a communication

revolution make. Economics trumps technology every time.”34

However, defenders of the digital age argue that newer media forms—from digital music

files, to online streaming of films and TV shows, to an array of social networking systems—allow

greater participation than any other medium. Mass customization, whereby media compa-

nies allow individual consumers to customize a Web page or other media form, permits the

public to engage with and create media as never before. For example, Internet portals such

as Yahoo! allow users to personalize their front-page services by choosing their own channels

of information—their favorite newspapers or sports teams, local movie listings and weather

broadcasts, and many other categories—within the Yahoo! interface. Users of similar services

like iGoogle, Facebook, and MySpace get the benefits of creating their own personal Web

space—often with their own original content—without having to write the underlying Web code.

They are, however, limited to the options, templates, and automated RSS feeds provided by the

media company and subject to the company’s overall business plan. Such mass customization

services blur the boundary between one-to-one communication, which we generally associate

with an office conversation or a telephone call, and mass communication, which we associate

with daily newspapers or TV programs.

In response to these new media forms, older media are using Internet technology to

increase their access to and feedback from varied audiences, soliciting e-mail from users and

fostering discussions in sponsored chat rooms and blogs. Skeptics raise doubts about the par-

ticipatory nature of discussions on the Internet. For instance, they warn that Internet users may

be searching out only those people whose beliefs and values are similar to their own. Although

it is important to be able to communicate across vast distances with people who have similar

viewpoints, these kinds of discussions may not serve to extend the diversity and tolerance that

are central to democratic ideals. However, we are still in the early years of the Internet. The

democratic possibilities of the Internet’s future are still endless.

68��MASS MEDIA AND THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

CHAPTER
REVIEW
COMMON THREADS

Most people love the simplicity of the classic Google search
page. The iGoogle home page builds on that by offering the
ability to “Create your own homepage in under 30 seconds.”
Enter your city, and the page’s design theme will dynamically
change images to reflect day and night. Enter your zip code,
and you get your hometown weather information or local
movie schedules. Tailor the page to bring up your favorite
RSS feeds, and stay on top of the information that interests
you the most.

This is just one form of mass customization—some-
thing no other mass medium has been able to provide.
(When is the last time a television, radio, newspaper, or
movie spoke directly to you?) This is one of the Web’s great-
est strengths—it can connect us to the world in a person-
ally meaningful way. But a casualty of the Internet may be
our shared common culture. A generation ago, students and
coworkers across the country gathered on Friday mornings
to discuss what happened on NBC’s “must-see” TV shows

One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is about the commercial nature of the mass media.
The Internet is no exception, as advertisers have capitalized on its ability to be customized.
How might this affect other media industries?

like Cosby, Seinfeld, Friends, and Will & Grace. Today it’s
more likely that they watched vastly different media the
night before. And if they did share something—say, a funny
YouTube video—it’s likely they all laughed alone, as they
watched it individually.

We have become a society divided by the media, often
split into our basic entity, the individual. One would think
that advertisers dislike this, since it is easier to reach a mass
audience by showing commercials during American Idol. But
mass customization gives advertisers the kind of personal
information they once only dreamed about: your e-mail
address, hometown, zip code, and a record of your inter-
ests—what Web pages you visit and what you buy online. If
you have a Facebook profile or a Gmail account, they may
know even more about you—what you did last night or what
you are doing right now. What will advertisers want to sell to
you with all this information? With the mass-customized
Internet, you may have already told them.

Internet, 40
ARPAnet, 40
e-mail, 42
microprocessors, 42
fiber-optic cable, 43
World Wide Web, 43
HTML (hypertext

markup language), 43
browsers, 43
Internet service provider (ISP), 44
broadband, 44

directories, 45
search engines, 45
digital communication, 45
instant messaging, 46
blogs, 46
wiki Web sites, 46
social media sites, 47
massively multiplayer online role-

playing games (MMORPGs), 53
avatar, 53
Telecommunications Act of 1996, 56

portal, 57
data mining, 59
e-commerce, 59
cookies, 59
spyware, 60
opt-in or opt-out policies, 60
phishing, 61
digital divide, 63
open-source software, 65
mass customization, 67

KEY TERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book.
The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.

CHAPTER 2 ● INTERNET��69

For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links
to media-related Web sites, and more, go to
bedfordstmartins.com/mediaculture.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. When did the Internet reach the novelty (development),
entrepreneurial, and mass medium stages?

2. How did the Internet originate? What role did the
government play?

3. How does the World Wide Web work? Why is it signifi-
cant in the development of the Internet?

4. What are the four main features of the commercial
structure of the Internet? How do they help users
access and navigate the Internet?

5. Why are Web 2.0 applications like social media sites
attractive to large media corporations?

The Internet Today: From Media Convergence to Web 3.0

6. What were the technological developments that enabled
media convergence?

7. What are the most popular types of converged digital
devices today, and how does each fill a cultural niche?

8. How is Web 3.0 emerging to function differently from
the current version of the Web?

Video Games and Interactive Environments

9. How did video games emerge as a mass medium?
10. How has the Internet changed video games?

1. What possibilities for the Internet’s future are you most
excited about? Why? What possibilities are most trou-
bling? Why?

2. What are the advantages of media convergence that
links televisions, computers, phones, homes, schools,
and offices?

QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
3. Do you think virtual interactive communities are genuine

communities? Why or why not?
4. As we move from a print-oriented Industrial Age to a

digitally based Information Age, how do you think indi-
viduals, communities, and nations will be affected?

11. How are video games now part of the broader media
culture?

The Economics and Issues of the Internet

12. Who are the major players vying for control of the
Internet?

13. How is advertising on the Internet different from all
other kinds of advertising in the history of mass commu-
nication?

14. What are the central concerns about the Internet
regarding security?

15. What kind of online content is considered inappropriate,
and why have acts of Congress failed in eliminating such
content?

16. What is the digital divide, and what is being done to
close the gap?

17. What are the major alternative voices on the Internet?
The Internet and Democracy

18. How can the Internet make democracy work better?
19. What are the key challenges to making the Internet itself

more democratic?

The Evolution of the Internet

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