In just under 50 years, computers have gone from frightening behemoths to countercultural totems to everyday consumer fashion accessories. The history of new media helps us understand why it is so ideologically powerful today. These lecture slides are from my Masters unit, Future Media Platforms, taught at Bournemouth University.

2. Overview
Part 1: Three Phases of New Media Growth
-- Institutional: Military, industrial, educational
-- Radical: countercultural visions of cyberspace
-- Commercial: new business models,
economies
Part 2: Colonising New Media
--The Internet as social space
--Theories of computer mediated
communication
--New media identities

3. Mythologies of new media
 The Internet is a powerful tool for self-realization
 The Internet will spread and promote democracy
 The Internet short-circuits traditional power
hierarchies
 The Internet will make you cool
 The Internet will make you rich
 The Internet mirrors natural evolution

4. “The denial of history is central to understanding myth
as depoliticized speech, because to deny history is to
remove from discussion active human agency, the
constraints of social structure, and the real world of
politics.
According to myth, the Information Age transcends
politics because it makes power available to everyone
and in great abundance. The defining characteristic
of politics, the struggle over the scarce resource of
power, is eliminated.”
(V. Mosco, 2004; Barthes,
1957)

5. Institutional Phase
The first computers were used in
institutional settings for:
Code breaking
Performing atomic simulations
Plotting trajectory of rockets
Naval artillery simulation
Analysing the census
Calculating insurance risk
Later in university research

6. "I think there is a world market for maybe five
computers.”
- Thomas John Watson, President of IBM, 1943
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in
their home.”
- Ken Olsen, Founder of Digital Equipment Corp, 1977
LINC, MIT Labs 1966

7. Timeline of Early Computing
The price per transistor on an integrated circuit fell from $50 in 1962 to $1 in
1971 to $0.001 in 1980 to 1/100,000th of a penny in 2000
A billion operations per second cost $8 trillion in 1961. In 2012 it cost $0.73

8. Until the 1970s computers were:
 Frightening (primarily used by large institutions to
measure, control, surveil and kill people)
 Concentrated in centres of power
 Expensive (early PDP-1 cost £500,000 in today’s
currency)
 Associated with expert knowledge, difficult to use
unless highly trained
 Imagined to have capabilities beyond real
performance

9. The Radical Phase
Emerging from countercultural
movements in the 1960s
libertarian, anti-hierarchical ethic
radically empowered individuals
Asserting mastery over the
autocratic computer

10. Levy’s ‘Hacker Ethic’
 Access to computers should be
unlimited and total.
 All information should be free.
 Mistrust authority—promote
decentralization.
 Hackers should be judged by skill,
not bogus criteria such as degrees,
age, race or position.
 You can create art and beauty on a
computer.
 Computers can change your life for
the better.

11. A quaint vision that persists…
Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of
flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of
Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave
us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no
sovereignty where we gather. […] We are creating a world
that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded
by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity,
movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all
based on matter, and there is no matter here.
John Perry Barlow (1996)

12. The world brings even the most radical gestures under its wing.

13. Opening shot of the commercial phase
Feedback we have gotten from the
hundreds of people using BASIC has all been
positive. Two surprising things are apparent,
however, 1) Most of these "users" never
bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair
owners have bought it), and 2) The amount of
royalties we have received makes the time
spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an
hour.
As the majority of hobbyists must be aware,
most of you steal your software. Hardware
must be paid for, but software is something to
share. Who cares if the people who worked on
it get paid?
“Open Letter to Hobbyists” (1976)

14. Today, the global semiconductor industry
Is worth $350 billion USD per year
Accounting for 10% of global GDP
Inventory is measured in billions of square
inches
Placed end-to-end, yearly output would circle
the Earth 5 times

15. Theories of social and economic
change
 Major social transformations since 1970: Economy,
Governance, Culture
 Changes to business environment as a consequence of
digital technology
 Theories of individual and group behaviour in computer-
mediated environments

16. Many terms for similar/related processes
 ‘Globalization’
 Late capitalism
 Informational capitalism
 Postindustrialism
 Postfordism
 Information society
 Network society

17. Effects:
Moderately increased productivity per worker due to
knowledge economy (but not increased employment)
Declining national sovereignty (transnational economic
agreements, mobility of capital investment, ratings
agencies)
Work and workers are increasingly organized around
flexible arrangements, making it easier for businesses
to be agile in globally competitive marketplace
Bifurcation of high-skilled/low-skilled workforces along
axis of knowledge intensity.

19. Porter (2001)
Internet creates distorted market signals:
 Companies have subsidized online ventures to gain marketshare
 Govts have subsidized online ventures through tax avoidance
 Curiosity, novelty that will presumably wear off
 Lower wages and other forms of remuneration accepted
Competitive advantage:
 Operational effectiveness difficult to sustain in era of internet.

20. “Postmodern information economies configure all
communication, even ‘looking’, as part of the
productive labour process. This is so because
communication produces information, which makes
up the core resource of the information economy.”
(Zwick et al, 2008)
2008 is the year we hit peak attention.
Matt Webb

21. Mark Deuze (2011) Media Life:
 We are increasingly involved as BOTH producers and
consumers of media
 Media is becoming invisible in daily life: media are
‘everywhere and therefore nowhere’.
 We increasingly move through our own personal
information space
 Everything is mediated: romantic relationships, shopping,
politics, work and leisure.
 We are moving as a society toward the top of Maslow’s
pyramid