PowerPoint Presentation Slide 1

Netscapes of Power

• Must watch “netscapes of power”: rise of gatekeepers and “walled gardens”
• Trend to bundling services for convenience
• Styling information services for personal preferences– and not challenging these ( narrower and narrower homogenous taste communities)
• Technologies of discrimination: owner preference in placing subsidiaries at front of retail shelf and burying competitive service providers

Fleras: Rhetoric and Reality ( p.269)

Rhetoric & Reality

• Subversive/Freewheel
• Egalitarian
• Anarchic Power to the People
• Globalizing
• Free
• Empowering and Enlightening
• Diversity

• Corporatized/Control
• Ehaves/Ehavenots
• Authoritarian power to the dollar
• Americanizing
• Marketing and Advertising
• Make Money
• Conformity

Social Issues: Surveillance

• Network architecture is now “smart”
• Before, telcos did not know the content of messages
• Now, they do. Bits are monitored, stored in charting flow and effective service
• Nortel and Cisco can establish network architectures which:
• Identify each traffic type-Web, email, voice, video…and isolate the type of application even down to specific brands, by the interface used, by the user typeand individual user identification or by the site address (winseck:331)

Surveillance 2

• Rise of “cookies” ( spies on content, personal information and preferences jeapordizing privacy)
• Technological potential of building a complete ‘data shadow’ of the consumer, to better market to them
• Emerging self regulation of services
• Eg restrictive private contracts for use, limiting video downloads, for example, in absence of regulation permitting it.
• Or: @Home…wide open powers to remove offensive matter which is too prone to authoritarian censorship
• Still major fights: first over spam ( reaccessing your email accounts, and next data shadowing/market surveillance)