PowerPoint Presentation Slide 1

The Walled Garden

• AOL Time Warner term
• Disney too
• Keep users within designated zones for as long as possible ( Winseck, 335)
• How?
• By creation of content and service menus, organization of hyperlinks, bias of search engings, network architecture, promotion, content synergies,elimination of bypasses
• Creation of walled gardens: safe, predictable, branded
• Eg: Disney assumes role of immigration officer in AOL’s world: if people enter their site, and then leave AOL, contract can be cancelled ( Winseck, 336)

The Information Gap

• Rest of the World is less than one-tenth on the way to cyberspace
• Vast continents ( Africa) left out of “global information highway”
• Rich consumers and those educated elites the first to embrace computers and the Internet
• Poor, uneducated slow: many countries do not have policies to help individuals(eg. Computers in the home), although do help schools

The Knowledge Gap

• Information and Knowledge gap is widening: despite mass penetration of the Internet in Canada, still high levels of illiteracy, ( under 25%) relatively low levels of university education ( several points below Europe), and growing child poverty: estimates place one in four to one in three kids below poverty level
• Structurally higher levels of unemployment, precarious jobs
• Gendered landscape of technological control