Chapter 5
The Look of the Web
Deciphering and analyzing the look of the web. The Web’s appearance has changed over time. The techniques of
quantitative analysis of media forms.
The Mouse Aesthetic: Apples, Apples, Icons and windows
The mythology of the emergence of personal computers, there has a developed a narrative that rivals
the biblical tale of David and Goliath.
The Hypertext Imaginary- The conceptualization of a system of automatically interconnected texts is typically
attributed to Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Atlantic Monthly article on the memex system.
Personalization-commerical portal sites such as Yahoo!
Chapter 6
The Web Economy
Christmas 1999-New York City
United States seemed fundamentally different from past christmasses.
The Gift and the Commodity
Typical political economic analysis of the media begins by detailing who own what and finishes with identifying
the implications.
The Web has developed clear connections to the government, public service and education.
The web has come to represent the future for many countries and computer mediated communication is
now seen as and tool for computer use.
The importance of counting on the web: the making of the audience commodity.
Television stations and networks for instance sell their audiences to advertisers who buy the
audience’s time. The placement of a commerical within a progamme relies on the programme on generate an audience.
Hacking As Counter-Economy
The Web economy’s fragility is that because of the very network of networks upon which it is built
there are possibilities that the security and firewalls designed to protect the citadels of the Web economy.
Chapter 7
The Web of Policy, Regulation and Copyright
The transnational discourse surrounding the Internet.
The significance of Metaphors
One can argue that the metaphors or conceptual frameworks which we use to make sense new
technologies can be either emancipatory or limiting.
Parallel trends can be seen in early discussions of radio where two competing metaphors were circulating.
Ideology of Information Technology
It must be recognized that specific events underpinning the information highway
concept often have antecedents.
The US is widley acknowledged a being a leader in promoting the
information highway idea. During the 1992 presidential election, AL Gore captured the support
of many US academics and the information industries by promoting the idea of “information superhighways”‘.
The Political Myth and the ideology of Information Technology
Studies comparing the investment in or the use of information technology by country, industry, firm and
using various economic indicators, have failed to establish a strong correlation between such technological
investment and growth in productivity.
The World Intellectual Property Organization
The White Paper and Digital Millenium Copyright Act recommendations have been the basis of negotiations at WIPO’s
conferences to consider possible treaties to bring copyright into the digital age. The two relevant to this discussion are
the Digital Treaty.
Content Regulation
Changing the moral values and the rise of the Web combined to make obscenity more pervasive and easier for
children to access.
One can argue that when pornographers discovered the web, politicians were forced to react.