PowerPoint Presentation Slide 1

Social Transformations of the Internet

• Utopic Visions
• Breaks oligopoly power
• Allows user control over media selected, compiled, used
• Provides new forms of social connection beyond space based
• New communities of interest may form ( beyond borders)
• Together with other technologies allow development of artificial intelligence/body/intelligence augmentation
• A Democratic Realization

• Dystopic Visions
• Reinforces and extends it ( US controls 65% share of world Internet server hosts)
• Keeps user in ‘invisible walled gardens’
• Has enabled social predation: largest use for pornography /weapons and illicit drug/and stalking on line
• New market intelligence aggregating in unprecedented scope: data shadows and on line surveillance
• Few use the Net for political news, mobilization: while alt.news and other organizations are growing: commercial search engines bury them so they are difficult to find…thus an authoritarian politics continued, not a democratic one

World Wide Web

• Between 22 and 800 million sites– less than half indexed
• Main search engines:
• Google (500 m page estimate)
• Alta Vista294)
• Yahoo
• Iwon,
• Northern Light
• Fast

Industry Structure

• No one owner of Internet
• ISP providers route through a tangled web of other providers
• One dominant PC software manufacturer: Microsoft ( Internet Explorer)
• Decade long anti trust suit settled out of court
• Like AT&T, US Department of Justice concerned about dominant market power, and predatory competition
• Until 1990s, little competition between telephones and cable companies: now starting
• Late 1990s a wave of Stock Speculation and large scale mergers for dot com sector just before its crash
• AOL ( which owns Netscape) tookover Time Warner: sign of new technology surpassing old
• Emergence of little known Netscapes of Power