This understanding of the economic power of the newly confident, post dot.com crash Internet media sectors prompts us to ask how its uses might interact with issues of power and control that are central to networks and consequent upon issues of ownership and investment associated with them. People will be concerned with the characteristics of networks and how they have consequently been considered to have an important (some say revolutionary) impact, both on the ways in which we live our lives and on the economic organization of society. In this section we survey the development of the Internet as communications using the tools of political economy, and we look at how the development of interactive new media has been influenced by the introduction of commercial interests. In asking these kinds of questions we will have recourse to the arguments of Williams (1974) for a model of thinking about the outcomes of communication technologies that are shaped by, on one the hand, what he refers to as social investment, and, on the other, by ‘community needs'.
Social investment includes both state and private capital investment in the development and manufacture of new technologies, for reasons of both profit and social value. For example, email has been the reason for the sale of many computers because it has allowed people to keep in touch at home as well as in business. ‘Community need’ includes both the market, in the sense of a collection of potential purchasers with the ability to pay, and also a more generalized sense of what communicative needs different kinds of societies and cultures might have. So, for instance, the communication needs of a feudal village are different from the communication needs of a twenty-first-century house dweller, not just in terms of the kinds of information in use but also in terms of methods of delivery.
The village can survive with one-to-one communications; the increased complexity of the urban setting requires systems that can deal with a mass audience. Here then we assume, for a moment, that which of the many possible affordances of web media become dominant is determined by the interaction between the communicative needs of the mode of early twenty-first-century Western societies and the ways in which commercial interests can profitably sustain them.
One of the factors determining the use of technologies of communication will be the kinds of investments made in equipment and personnel; who makes them, and what they expect in return. There is no guarantee that the investment will necessarily be in forms of communication that are most appropriate for the majority of people. Because the ownership of investment funds tends to be in the hands of commercial organizations, the modernization of communications infrastructure only takes place on the basis of potential profitability. Take, for example, the installation of fibre-optic communications cable across the African continent. A number of African nations are involved in the development but its operational structures will be oriented to those who can pay for access. Many states that might wish to use it for education and information may not only find it too expensive but also simply unavailable to them (McChesney et al. 1998).
There can be no doubt that the development has been led by investment opportunity rather than community demand. It will undoubtedly provide much needed communications facilities, but their actual availability is clearly not being pursued primarily for the public good. The consequences of the uneven access that will flow from such an investment are not always possible to predict. The uses to which media technologies are put, including attempts to mobilize them for practices resistant to their commercial ethos, will also have an impact upon the social form they come to assume.
Throughout the period in which economic imperatives were positioning new media of communications as central to the global economy (the 1980s) a worldwide community of users and developers was growing whose direct material communicative aims had far more in common with pleasure and entertainment, such as music, dating and photography, than with competitive advantage, profitability and commercial use.
Because people are concerned with economic development, cultural uses and their interaction we draw on a theory of base and superstructure, particularly as developed by Raymond Williams. For Williams this is not simply a case of the economic base of society defining the kinds of cultural and social formations that might exist – rather the notion of the relationship between base and superstructure is an interactive one and primarily about determination. The relationship is one by which each aspect both enables and limits the other. In other words, the development of communicative and information technologies is both about possible technical uses and about the social and economic circumstances within which they develop.
It is, as Garnham has argued, about the way in which production takes place and is associated with particular social practices (Garnham 1997). To put it simply: where a free and open system of communicative networks (the Internet) has developed within an economic system based on property and profits (capitalism) one has to come to an accommodation with the other.
Generally, it is important to emphasize that in the middle of this interaction lie real people who make real decisions, to paraphrase Marx: people make culture but not necessarily under conditions of their own choosing. Theories of base and superstructure need to be understood as ways of understanding those factors constraining and enabling the implementation of decisions made by people not simply as economic concerns bulldozing everything and everyone before them. Williams expressed this as a direction of travel rather than an inevitable conclusion. ‘Much of the advanced technology is being developed within firmly capitalist social relations, and investment, though variably, is directed within a perspective of capitalist reproduction, in immediate and in more general terms’ (Williams 1980).
BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA
BAPRM III - 42686
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