[ England ] Luke Martell

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The digital and Internet era①

[ England ] Luke Martell

A technological development much emphasized in discussions of globalization is the internet.The Internet is global, or potentially global, and involves more or less instant access to information or communication.Although there is great inequality in access, there are also poor parts of the world where it is available relatively inexpensively.The Internet integrates telecommunications, computing and media technologies.Computers that were used to process information unlinked with other computers now have such connections worldwide and do morethan just handle information or word process.They are a means of communication and for fetching information and media, written, visual and audio, globally.It gives people across the world access to common global information, although in countries such as Cuba, North Korea or China use of the internet, or areas of it, is restricted.Internet availability is globalizing rapidly, although still very uneven.In terms of economic motivations behind the rise of the Internet, advertising revenue is a key factor.Much Internet content is funded by adverts rather than consumer payment.

The Internet of the early twenty-first century is relatively unregulated by governments and a qualitatively different aspect is that those with Internet access can contribute as well as receive information, without extensive financial or institutional backing, for instance, through blogging or participating in the interactive dimensions of sites.People who are consumers or users can also become producers of content.Sites such as Blogspot and WordPress provide free resources that people can use to publish blogs and sites such as MySpace and YouTube allow people to post video or music for free.Individuals can publish their own websites.Many corporate or political sites provide fora where users can contribute.

In US politics political bloggers are an important group perceived to have an impact on the electoral fortunes of candidates, for instance, in presidential nomination campaigns and elections.Wikis are an example of the democratizing and equalizing potential of the Internet.The online encyclopedia Wikipedia can be edited by any user with Internet access.It has become an important source of information for many people.The consequence could be poor-quality information, misuse and chaos, and many question its reliability.But it provides useful information, diverse and critical views, with openness to users to define that information.The public can be active producers of content, independent of institutional backing, and not just passive users.At the same time, there is a question mark over whether independent producers of content change the agenda of public discussions and so provide a qualitatively different experience for Internet consumers.

Authors such as Castells (2000, see also Holton 2007) see the access and horizontal networking that the Internet allows as part of a developing network society.People can communicate and get organized through hierarchical or bureaucratic forms such as states, political organizations or corporations.Networks are a form of mutual civil society organization and communication that is an alternative to organization via the state or market.Individuals and groups can counter cultural imperialism via the Internet, providing their own meanings and information.It has been a means for networking organization used by global social movements and some see networking as generalized beyond this to, for instance, types of work organization.

There are criticisms of the idea of the network society, and Castells is conscious of its inequalities.There is a digital divide between those who have access to the Internet and those who do not.Sub-Saharan Africa is mostly outside this network society at present.And the network society exists alongside and intertwined with one where the economic and political power of corporation and states wield disproportionate power and where such organizations make the most important decisions that affect economics, politics and people’s lives.

Some of the big media corporations buy up Internet companies and fora where network has developed and colonized such areas themselves.The democratizing element of the Internet has to be weighed up against the counter-movements of large corporations into Internet industries.News Corporation, for example, acquired MySpace.Google, whose motto is ‘don’t be evil,’ has gained increasing control across the Internet, in part by buying up other smaller companies, such asYouTube.And companies such as Microsoft and Time Warner have also diversified into ownership in the Internet sector.

Potentially the Internet can be equalizing and democratic in the access it gives to individuals to contribute and be heard.That large swathes of content and function on the Internet are free to the user is important and increases the range of things which Internet users as consumers can access.But whether the Internet provides a leap forward in access to culture for consumers greater than that provided by radio, TV or film, or than the innovation produced by printing, transoceanic cables, the telegraph and the telephone, is questionable.These allowed instant or mass communications.Mass instant communications and access to information were available before the Internet which has provided a quantitative increase in these rather than a new qualitative shift to them for the first time.

The Internet is faster, providing greater ease of access for consumers to information than provided by previous forms of technology, and its speed increases the volumes of information that can be reached.News, reference information, banking, shopping, music and video can be accessed with greater ease and convenience, more quickly and broadly.But as this information could be obtained before the Internet, albeit more awkwardly and slowly, the Internet is a great resource for radically improving access, rather than establishing access that was not there before, a quantitative improvement rather than a qualitative shift in such areas.Similarly, social networking in the Internet, for instance, on MySpace and Facebook, often adds a virtual dimension to already-existing real-world relations, rather than adding new forms or types of relations.

From a sociological point of view, the key thing is not what is new and exciting about the technology, but what is socially novel about it.Technologically, the Internet is revolutionary.But it does not necessarily follow that its social impact is transformational and this has to be considered separately.The qualitatively different thing is that the Internet provides new access for ordinary people as producers to publish content independently of financial or institutional banking.The change for consumers of culture, compared to previous media technologies, is more quantitative than qualitative.

[About the author]Luke Martell is a professor of Political Sociology at University of Sussex, with interests in socialism, alternative societies, social movements and global politics.His publications include: The Third Way and Beyond: criticisms, futures, alternatives, 2004; The Sociology of Globalization, 2001; New Labour, 1998; The Sociology of Politics,1998; Ecology and Society, 1994.

① Selected from The Sociology of Globalization, Charper three: Technology, Economy and the Globalization of Culture.Luke Martell, Cambridge：Polity Press, 2010; Shenyang, Liaoning People’s Publishing Press, 2014.