WORLD WIDE WEB (WWW)

In the origins of the World Wide Web, we can see how the idea of social form applies not only to hardware and commercial objects but also to forms of knowledge. The origin of the web lay in a widely readable computer code, HTML (HyperText Markup Language), first published in 1990. It was developed in the scientific academic world to transfer images and text within the international user community associated with CERN (Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire). Since that community was using a variety of types of computers and associated software, many with their own ways of handling text and images, the challenge was to develop a code that would work equally well on all of them. Rather than try to develop yet another set of international standards for files, the new code simply told a wide range of computer systems what to do with the files they were receiving. To make the new code even easier to use web browsers were developed at the university-based National Centre for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA).

The code was made publicly available and is still the basis of both Netscape and Internet Explorer. Once web browsers became items of commercial interest, extra gimmicks and capabilities gave a business advantage and meant that there was good reason for private companies to keep some code developments to themselves. In consequence, business organisations were now creating new standards that only their own products could interpret. Commercial investment building on academic research has thus given the web browser a new social form. In other words, the form and distribution and capabilities of a web browser are as much a product of the ownership of the code as of technical potential. Moreover the fact that this code was first developed in the public sector, as part of an attempt to promote co-operation and exchange, has a legacy within the social form of the web browser despite its subsequent development within a market framework. The roots of the Internet in the publicly funded uses and the PC in the private sector are both integral to the way in which the Web and its communicative capabilities have remained in play. It is notable that the power of this public root of Internet use is such that the control of specifications for HTML and it offshoots such as XML remain important methods for determining the actions and locations of other software within browsers. For example Microsoft’s latest application for delivering media, Limelight, still depends on some very traditional HTML as well as a variety of proprietary software.

We have seen in these examples that the form of a medium is a product not only of what is technically possible, but also of the material and economic circumstances of its creation. These circumstances may be commercial or intellectual, or a mixture of these and other factors, but they leave the medium with a social form that cannot be ignored. The outcome of these three vital developments is hardly determined any more by the technology that they contain than by the social circumstance of their development. But the ‘social form’ which they take, along with other developments, and investment in communications combine to give us the Internet. We can see that new media, how they are represented, how they are sold and the commercial interests underlying them, are the complex outcomes of the interaction between our existing culture, business interests, and major investments in telecommunications. All are underpinned by the availability of computing power in an average home that far exceeds that which put a man on the moon in 1969. But on its own this is not enough to explain the for a discussion of the social form of the PC as a domestic commodity

Robert X. Cringely, Accidental Empires: how the boys of Silicon Valley make their millions, battle foreign competition and still can’t get a date, London: Penguin (1996), for a well-informed and entertaining description of the ups and downs of the invention of the Personal Computer particular form that information and communications technologies have taken. At this point it is important to note that the interaction under discussion is actually implemented by real people who also require an ideological structure in order to negotiate the range of meanings and practices that will construct the media regime under discussion. We will see how terms such as information economy both express and construct ways of thinking and consequent action.

Limits on commercial influence We have argued that it is important to note the influence of commercial interests on the development of the Internet; however it would be a mistake to see business and corporations as always successful in their attempts to dominate new media. As we can see in the discussion of the music industry and the control of the distribution of music the existing structures and practices can make it difficult for them to switch operations to new potentially profitable investments. For example the big Internet service providers in the US, Prodigy and CompuServe, completely misinterpreted the demands that users would begin to make of the Internet in the 1980s (Stone, 1995). They assumed they would be able to market information on a broadcast model such as booking services, weather forecasts, news services, etc. It transpired that the subscribers who formed their early users were more interested in connectivity, in chat, bulletin boards and email – in new collaborative or intimate communication experiences. In fact as the development of Web 2.0 has shown besides retail provision, communications has remained a number one use.

BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA

BAPRM III - 42686