STOCK MARKET WATCH - Friday, 3 February 2012

[Demeter]

6. The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism

http://monthlyreview.org/2011/03/01/the-internets-unholy-marriage-to-capitalism

John Bellamy Foster (jfoster @ monthlyreview.org) is editor of Monthly Review, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, and author (with Brett Clark and Richard York) of The Ecological Rift (Monthly Review Press, 2010). Robert W. McChesney (rwmcches @ uiuc.edu) is Gutgsell Endowed Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and author of The Political Economy of Media (Monthly Review Press, 2008) and (with John Nichols) The Death and Life of American Journalism (2010).

The United States and the world are now a good two decades into the Internet revolution, or what was once called the information age. The past generation has seen a blizzard of mind-boggling developments in communication, ranging from the World Wide Web and broadband, to ubiquitous cell phones that are quickly becoming high-powered wireless computers in their own right. Firms such as Google, Amazon, Craigslist, and Facebook have become iconic. Immersion in the digital world is now or soon to be a requirement for successful participation in society. The subject for debate is no longer whether the Internet can be regarded as a technological development in the same class as television or the telephone. Increasingly, the debate is turning to whether this is a communication revolution closer to the advent of the printing press. The full impact of the Internet revolution will only become apparent in the future, as more technological change is on the horizon that can barely be imagined and hardly anticipated.2 But enough time has transpired, and institutions and practices have been developed, that an assessment of the digital era is possible, as well as a sense of its likely trajectory into the future....

What is striking, as one returns to the late 1980s and early 1990s and reads about the Internet and its future, is that these accounts were almost uniformly optimistic. With all information available to everyone at the speed of light and impervious to censorship, all existing institutions were going to be changed for the better. There was going to be a worldwide two-way flow, or multi-flow, a democratization of communication unthinkable before then. Corporations could no longer bamboozle consumers and crush upstart competitors; governments could no longer operate in secrecy with a kept-press spouting propaganda; students from the poorest and most remote areas would have access to educational resources once restricted to the elite. In short, people would have unprecedented tools and power. For the first time in human history, there would not only be information equality and uninhibited instant communication access between all people everywhere, but there would also be access to a treasure trove of uncensored knowledge that only years earlier would have been unthinkable, even for the world’s most powerful ruler or richest billionaire. Inequality and exploitation were soon to be dealt their mightiest blow.

The Internet, or more broadly, the digital revolution is truly changing the world at multiple levels. But it has also failed to deliver on much of the promise that was once seen as implicit in its technology. If the Internet was expected to provide more competitive markets and accountable businesses, open government, an end to corruption, and decreasing inequality—or, to put it baldly, increased human happiness—it has been a disappointment. To put it another way, if the Internet actually improved the world over the past twenty years as much as its champions once predicted, we dread to think where the world would be if it had never existed...

NOW, THESE GUYS OUGHT TO GET OUT OF THE IVORY TOWER MORE OFTEN