A photo of a book titled, Media and Culture by Richard Campbell, Christopher R.Martin, and Bettina Fabos.

A photo of a book titled, Media and Culture by Richard Campbell, Christopher R.Martin, and Bettina Fabos.

PART 1Digital Media and Convergence

Think about the media technologies in your life when you were growing up. How did you watch TV shows, listen to music, or communicate with friends? And how have those technologies changed since then?

Ever-increasing download speeds and more portable devices have fundamentally changed the ways in which we access and consume media. As you can see on the infographic on the opposite page, media didn’t always develop this quickly; an early medium, like radio, could take decades to fully emerge, while today a website or an app can reach similar audience thresholds in a matter of years or even days. With these changes, the history of mass media has moved from emergence to convergence. While electronic media have been around for a long time, it was the emergence of the Internet as a mass medium that allowed an array of media to converge in one space and be easily shared, leading us to the digital turn . This shift will continue to shape our media consumption for years to come.

The digital turn has made us more fragmented—but also more connected. Facebook and Twitter have made it easier to tell friends—and strangers—what we’re watching, reading, and listening to. And while digital media have led to positive social movements, they have also made it easier for bad actors to harass us or sow discord in our politics. For better and worse, mass media are more integrated into our lives than ever before.

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Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture to explore an interactive time line of the history of mass communication; practice your media literacy skills; test your knowledge of the concepts in the textbook with LearningCurve; and explore and discuss current trends in mass communication with video activities, video assessment tools, and more.

An infographic titled From Medium to Mass Media is shown.

Top: Data from: “comScore 2017 U.S. Mobile App Report,” August 24, 2017, www.comscore.com/Insights/Presentations-and-Whitepapers/2017/The-2017-US-Mobile-App-Report .

Bottom: Data from: Simon Khalaf and Lali Kesiraju, “U.S. Consumers Time-Spent on Mobile Crosses 5 Hours a Day,” Flurry, March 2, 2017, http://flurrymobile.tumblr.com/post/157921590345/us-consumers-time-spent-on-mobile-crosses-5 .

CHAPTER 2The Internet, Digital Media, and Media Convergence
A photo shows two girls looking at their cellphones.

FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out, is the anxiety that something exciting may be happening while you’re off doing something else. The uninterrupted Internet connection we get from smartphones allows us to be in constant contact with friends through social media. But at what cost?

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTERNET AND THE WEB

SOCIAL MEDIA AND DEMOCRACY

CONVERGENCE AND MOBILE MEDIA

THE ECONOMICS AND ISSUES OF THE INTERNET

THE INTERNET AND DEMOCRACY

FOR AT LEAST some of us, the social mediated version of ourselves becomes the predominant way we experience the world. As Time magazine has noted, “Experiences don’t feel fully real” until we have “tweeted them or tumbled them or YouTubed them—and the world has congratulated [us]for doing so.”1 Social media is all about us—we are simultaneously the creators and the subjects. But the flip side of promoting our own experiences on social media as the most awesome happenings ever (and too bad you aren’t here) is the social anxiety associated with reading about other people’s experiences and realizing that you are not actually there.

This problem is called Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), and it has been defined as “the uneasy and sometimes all-consuming feeling that you’re missing out—that your peers are doing, in the know about or in possession of more or something better than you [are].”2 There are plenty of platforms for posting about ourselves and anxiously creeping on others—Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and Instagram are just a few of the sites that can feed our FOMO problem. The fear of missing out has been around since long before social media was invented. Party chatter, photos, postcards, and holiday letters usually put the most positive spin on people’s lives. But social media and mobile technology make being exposed to the interactions you missed a 24/7 phenomenon. There is potentially always something better you could have/should have been doing, right?

With FOMO, there is a “desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing.” Therefore, the person suffering from the anxiety continues to be tethered to social media, tracking “friends” and sacrificing time that might be spent having in-person, unmediated experiences.3 And though spending all this time on social media is a personal choice, it may not make us happy. In fact, a study by University of Michigan researchers found that the use of Facebook makes college students feel worse about themselves. The two-week study found that the more the students used Facebook, the more two components of well-being declined: how people feel moment to moment, and how satisfied they are with their lives—regardless of how many Facebook “friends” they had in their network.4

Studies about happiness routinely conclude that the best path to subjective well-being (happiness) and life satisfaction is having a community of close personal relationships. Social psychologists Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener acknowledge that the high use of mobile phones, text messaging, and social media is evidence that people want to connect. But they also explain that “we don’t just need relationships: we need close ones.” They conclude, “The close relationships that produce the most happiness are those characterized by mutual understanding, caring, and validation of the other person as worthwhile.”5 Thus, frequent contact isn’t enough to produce the kinds of relationships that produce the most happiness.

Ironically, there has never been a medium better than the Internet and its social media platforms to bring people together. How many people do you know who met online and went on to have successful friendships or romantic relationships? How often have social media connections enhanced close relationships for you? Still, according to Diener and Biswas-Diener, maintaining close relationships may require a “vacation” from social media from time to time, experiencing something together with a friend or friends. Of course (and we hate to say it), you will still need to text, message, e-mail, or call to arrange that date (see also “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Note to Self for Healthy Digital Consumption”).

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTERNET AND THE WEB
From its humble origins as a military communications network in the 1960s, the Internet became increasingly interactive by the 1990s, allowing immediate two-way communication and one-to-many communication. By 2000, the Internet was a multimedia source for both information and entertainment, as it quickly became an integral part of our daily lives. For example, in 2000, about 50 percent of American adults were connected to the Internet; today, about nine out of ten American adults use the Internet.6 Although the Internet is an American invention, the Internet is now global in scale and use. Asia has about half the world’s Internet users, and in 2017, India surpassed the United States in the number of active Facebook accounts.7

The Birth of the Internet
The Internet originated as a military-government project, with computer time-sharing as one of its goals. In the 1960s, computers were relatively new, and there were only a few of the expensive, room-sized mainframe computers across the country for researchers to use. The Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) developed a solution to enable researchers to share computer processing time beginning in the late 1960s. This original Internet—called ARPAnet and nicknamed the Net—enabled military and academic researchers to communicate on a distributed network system (see Figure 2.1). First, ARPA created a wired network system in which users from multiple locations could log into a computer whenever they needed it. Second, to prevent logjams in data communication, the network used a system called packet switching, which broke down messages into smaller pieces to more easily route them through the multiple paths on the network before reassembling them on the other end.

A figure shows three different forms of distributed networks.

FIGURE 2.1

DISTRIBUTED NETWORKS

In a centralized network (a), all the paths lead to a single nerve center. Decentralized networks (b) contain several main nerve centers. In a distributed network (c), which resembles a net, there are no nerve centers; if any connection is severed, information can be immediately rerouted and delivered to its destination. But is there a downside to distributed networks when it comes to the circulation of network viruses?

Information from Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

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Ironically, one of the most hierarchically structured and centrally organized institutions in our culture—the national defense industry—created the Internet, possibly the least hierarchical and most decentralized social network ever conceived. Each computer hub in the Internet has similar status and power, so nobody can own the system outright, and nobody has the power to kick others off the network. There isn’t even a master power switch, so authority figures cannot shut off the Internet—although as we will discuss later, some nations and corporations have attempted to restrict access for political or commercial benefit.

An essential innovation during the development stage of the Internet was e-mail. It was invented in 1971 by computer engineer Ray Tomlinson, who developed software to send electronic mail messages to any computer on ARPAnet. He decided to use the @ symbol to signify the location of the computer user, thus establishing the “login name@host computer” convention for e-mail addresses.

At this point in the development stage, the Internet was primarily a tool for universities, government research labs, and corporations involved in computer software and other high-tech products to exchange e-mail and post information. As the use of the Internet continued to proliferate, the entrepreneurial stage quickly came about.

The Net Widens
From the early 1970s until the late 1980s, a number of factors (both technological and historical) brought the Net to the entrepreneurial stage, in which it became a marketable medium. With the introduction in 1971 of microprocessors , or miniature circuits that process and store electronic signals, thousands of transistors and related circuitry could be integrated with thin strands of silicon, along which binary codes traveled. Microprocessors signaled the Net’s marketability as manufacturers introduced the first personal computers (PCs), which were smaller, cheaper, and more powerful than the bulky computer systems of the 1960s. With personal computers now readily available, a second opportunity for marketing the Net came in 1986, when the National Science Foundation developed a high-speed communications network (NSFNET) designed to link university research supercomputer centers around the country and also encourage private investment in the Net. This innovation led to a dramatic increase in Internet use and further opened the door to the widespread commercial possibilities of the Internet.

A map of the United States shows the NSFNET Network in 1986 and the commercial Internet of the 1990s.

NSFNET NETWORK

The National Science Foundation developed NSFNET in 1986 to promote research and education. As part of this effort, the NSF funded several university supercomputing centers and linked them with a high-speed network, which became the basis for the commercial Internet of the 1990s.

In the mid-1980s, fiber-optic cable had become the standard for transmitting communication data speedily. This development of thinner, faster cables made the commercial use of computers even more viable than before. With this increased speed, few limits existed with regard to the amount of information that digital technology could transport.

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, the ARPAnet military venture officially ended. By that time, a growing community of researchers, computer programmers, amateur hackers, and commercial interests had already tapped into the Net, creating tens of thousands of points on the network and the initial audience for its emergence as a mass medium.

The Commercialization of the Internet
The introduction of the World Wide Web and the first web browsers in the 1990s helped transform the Internet into a mass medium. Soon after these developments, the Internet quickly became commercialized, leading to battles between corporations vying to attract the most users and those who wished to preserve the original public, nonprofit nature of the Net.

The World Begins to Browse
Before the 1990s, most of the Internet’s traffic was for e-mail, file transfers, and remote access of computer databases. The World Wide Web (or the web) changed all that. Developed in the late 1980s by software engineer Tim Berners-Lee at Switzerland’s CERN particle physics lab to help scientists better collaborate, the web was initially a data-linking system that allowed computer-accessed information to associate with, or link to, other information no matter where it was on the Internet. Known as hypertext, this data-linking feature of the web was a breakthrough for those attempting to use the Internet. HTML (hypertext markup language) , the written code that creates web pages and links, is a language that all computers can read; thus, computers with different operating systems, such as Windows or Mac OS, can communicate easily. The development of the web and HTML allowed information to be organized in an easy-to-use, nonlinear manner, making way for the next step in using the Internet.

A screenshot shows a document of NCSA Mosaic for MS Windows, titled NCSA Mosaic Home Page.

WEB BROWSERS

The GUI (graphical user interface) of the World Wide Web changed overnight with the release of Mosaic in 1993. As the first popular web browser, Mosaic unleashed the multimedia potential of the Internet. Mosaic was the inspiration for the commercial browser Netscape, which was released a year later.

The release of web browsers —the software packages that help users navigate the web—brought the web to mass audiences. In 1993, computer programmers led by Marc Andreessen at the National Center for

Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign released Mosaic, the first window-based browser to load text and graphics together in a magazine-like layout, with attractive (for its time) fonts and easy-to-use back, forward, home, and bookmark buttons at the top. A year later, Andreessen joined investors in California’s Silicon Valley to introduce a commercial browser, Netscape. These breakthroughs helped universities and businesses, and later home users, get connected.

As the web became the most popular part of the Internet, many thought that the key to commercial success on the Net would be through a web browser. In 1995, Microsoft released its own web browser, Internet Explorer, which overtook Netscape as the most popular web browser. Today, Microsoft has replaced Internet Explorer with its new browser, Edge, while Chrome, Safari, and Firefox remain leading browsers.

Users Link in through Telephone and Cable Wires
In the first decades of the Internet, most people connected to “cyberspace” through telephone wires. In 1985, AOL (formerly America Online) began connecting millions of home users to its proprietary web system via dial-up access, quickly becoming the United States’ top Internet service provider (ISP) . AOL’s success was so great that by 2001, the Internet start-up bought the world’s largest media company, Time Warner—a deal that shocked the industry and signaled the Internet’s economic significance as a vehicle for media content. As connections through broadband , which can quickly download multimedia content, became more available, users moved away from the slower telephone dial-up service and toward high-speed service from cable, telephone, or satellite companies.8 Today, the major ISPs in the United States are AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Spectrum (owned by Charter Communications), and Cox. There are also hundreds of local services, many offered by regional telephone and cable companies that compete to provide consumers with access to the Internet.

People Embrace Digital Communication
In digital communication , an image, a text, or a sound is converted into electronic signals (represented as a series of binary numbers—ones and zeros) that are then reassembled as a precise reproduction of the image, text, or sound. Digital signals operate as pieces, or bits (from BInary digiTS), of information representing two values, such as yes/no, on/off, or 0/1. Used in various combinations, these digital codes can duplicate, store, and play back the most complex kinds of media content.

E-mail was one of the earliest services of the Internet, and people typically used the e-mail services connected to their ISPs before major web corporations—such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft (Hotmail)—began to offer free web-based e-mail accounts to draw users to their sites. Today, all the top e-mail services—each of which now has millions of users—include advertisements in their users’ e-mail messages, one of the costs of the “free” e-mail accounts. Google’s Gmail goes one step further by scanning messages to dynamically match a relevant ad to the text each time an e-mail message is opened. Such targeted advertising has become a hallmark feature of the Internet.

Although e-mail remains a standard for business-related text communications in the digital era, it has been surpassed in popularity by social apps, which include Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter.

Search Engines Organize the Web

A photo shows a girl using the Snapchat dog filter while taking a selfie.

SNAPCHAT allows users to send one another photos, videos, and/or text that will disappear after a certain amount of time. Like a lot of popular apps, the program gained a large following from a young audience and expanded out from there. Hundreds of millions of photos are sent through the application every day.

As the number of websites on the Internet quickly expanded, companies seized the opportunity to provide ways to navigate this vast amount of information by providing directories and search engines. One of the more popular search engines, Yahoo!, began as a directory. In 1994, Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a web page to organize their favorite websites, first into categories, then into more and more subcategories as the web grew. At that point, the entire World Wide Web was almost manageable, with only about twenty-two thousand websites.

Eventually, though, having employees catalog individual websites became impractical. Search engines offer a more automated route to finding content by allowing users to enter key words or queries to locate related web pages. Search engines are built on mathematical algorithms. Google, released in 1998, became a major success because it introduced a new algorithm that mathematically ranked a page’s popularity based on how many other pages linked to it. In 2016: 2024 – Do my homework – Help write my assignment online, Google announced it was aware of more than 130 trillion web pages (although it had indexed only a portion of them), up from one billion in 2000.9 By 2018: 2024 – Write My Essay For Me | Essay Writing Service For Your Papers Online, Google remained the dominant search engine, with a global market share across all platforms of approximately 91.8 percent of searches, with Microsoft’s Bing at 2.8 percent, Baidu (based in China) at 1.7%, Yahoo! at 1.6 percent, and Russia’s Yandex at 0.6 percent.10

SOCIAL MEDIA AND DEMOCRACY
In just a decade, social media have changed the way we consume, relate to, and even produce media, as well as the way we communicate with others. We can share our thoughts and opinions, write or update an encyclopedic entry, start a petition or fund-raising campaign, post a video, create or explore virtual worlds, and instantly reach an audience of thousands of people. As such, social media has proven to be an effective tool for democratic action, bringing to light repressive regimes that thrive on serving up propaganda and hiding their atrocities from view.

One of the earliest instances of democratic action were the wave of protests in more than a dozen Arab nations in North Africa and the Middle East that began in late 2010 – Essay Writing Service: Write My Essay by Top-Notch Writer and resulted in four rulers’ being forced from power by mid-2014: 2024 – Essay Writing Service. Custom Essay Services Cheap. The period, dubbed “Arab Spring,” began in Tunisia. Young activists, using mobile phones and social media, organized marches and protests across Tunisia. As satellite news networks spread the story and protesters’ videos to the rest of the world, Tunisia’s dictator of nearly twenty-four years fled the country. In the following spring, pro-democracy protests spread to other countries, including Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, and Oman. In Libya and Yemen, it resulted in civil war, and in Syria, an ongoing civil war with multiple warring factions has thus far left at least 500,000 dead and more than five million displaced, causing the greatest global humanitarian crisis in decades.11

Soon, however, the effectiveness of social media for evil purposes also became clear. One of the warring parties in Syria and Iraq was the terrorist organization ISIS, which turned out to be successful in using the Internet and social media to recruit naïve young men and women from other countries to Syria and Iraq, and to inspire others to commit terrorism in their home countries.12

The events of the Arab Spring in 2011 inspired the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States later that year, in which hundreds of people occupied a park in New York’s financial district and made encampments in hundreds of other cities to protest economic inequality. The physical occupations didn’t last, but the movement changed the language of economic inequality with the chant, “We are the 99 percent.”13 #OccupyWallStreet was the model for another social movement in 2013, Black Lives Matter. After the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting of unarmed African American teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida, Alicia Garza wrote, “Black people, I love you. I love us. Our lives matter” in a Facebook post describing her anger and heartbreak. When Garza’s friend Patrisse Cullors saw the post and shared it along with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, these same words inspired a new chapter in civil rights activism. Garza and Cullors brought in friend Opal Tometi, and the three women, all in their late twenties or early thirties, cofounded the Black Lives Matter movement. #BlackLivesMatter helped change the conversation about race in America, and was a leading group in protests following the 2014: 2024 – Essay Writing Service | Write My Essay For Me Without Delay shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. By 2018: 2024 – Write My Essay For Me | Essay Writing Service For Your Papers Online, the group had twenty-one chapters in North America. In 2017, another movement emerged in light of the sexual misconduct allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein. The hashtag #metoo became a rallying point in social media for women to reveal stories of sexual harassment and assault in the workplace. The hashtag was first used by Tarana Burke in 2006 – Write a paper; Professional research paper writing service – Best essay writers for women of color to share stories of sexual abuse.14 In 2017, actor Alyssa Milano used the term to encourage women to acknowledge if they had been sexually harassed or assaulted. Millions of women responded, and the hashtag set off a national and international discussion, as powerful men in Hollywood and other communities were publicly accused of sexual abuse, which, in many cases, resulted in the accused abuser’s downfall.

Hashtag activism—so called because of the use of the symbol # before a word or phrase that quickly communicates a larger idea, event, or cause—offers a compelling illustration of just how powerful social media can be when it is channeled toward a cause.

The flexible and decentralized nature of the Internet and social media is in large part what makes them such powerful tools for subverting control. In China, the Communist Party has tightly controlled mass communication for decades. As an increasing number of Chinese citizens take to the Internet, an estimated thirty thousand government censors monitor or even block web pages, blogs, chat rooms, and e-mails. The Chinese government frequently blocks social media sites. Repeated censoring of Google’s Chinese search engine (Google.cn) caused Google to move it to Hong Kong. And for those who persist in practicing “subversive” free speech, there can be severe penalties: Paris-based Reporters without Borders reports that fifteen Chinese journalists and thirty-nine netizens were in prison in 2018: 2024 – Write My Essay For Me | Essay Writing Service For Your Papers Online for writing articles and blogs that criticized the government.15 Still, Chinese dissenters bravely play cat-and-mouse with Chinese censors, using free services like Hushmail, Freegate, and Ultrasurf (the latter two produced by Chinese immigrants in the United States) to break through the Chinese government’s blockade. (For more on how the Internet can interact with politics, see “Examining Ethics: Social Media Fraud and Elections”.)

A photo shows protestors demonstrate in the Black Lives Matter movement.

THE BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT, which began as a response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal after he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, has grown to include dozens of chapters across the United States. Per the organization, “[o]ur intention from the very beginning was to connect Black people from all over the world who have a shared desire for justice to act together in their communities. The impetus for that commitment was, and still is, the rampant and deliberate violence inflicted on us by the state.”

EXAMINING ETHICS
Social Media Fraud and Elections

In the early years of social media, it seemed as if democracy had a new friend. Ideally, social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube would open up political conversation, enabling democratic discourse to flourish. In 2010 – Essay Writing Service: Write My Essay by Top-Notch Writer, the London newspaper the Guardian optimistically called Facebook “the election’s town square” and hoped “that people [were] prepared to let their politics show online.”1 The Guardian was right: People did let their politics show online, and many of them posted relevant news stories, offered thoughtful discussion, and organized friends to become more politically involved. It turned out, however, that there were a lot of jerks hanging out in the election’s town square: people posting nasty political memes, heated arguments, and insults. It all came to a head with the 2016: 2024 – Do my homework – Help write my assignment online presidential election. “What had been simmering all year suddenly boiled over as [the] presidential election cycle made online friends hostile and prompted many to mute or unfriend those whose political rantings were creating stress,” the Dayton Daily News wrote.2

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the worst of it. There were also criminals in the election’s town square, as foreign countries infiltrated social media to spread political disinformation and disrupt America’s 2016: 2024 – Do my homework – Help write my assignment online presidential election. The assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division testified before a U.S. Senate committee in June 2017 regarding a report, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent Elections.” He said, in part:

Russia’s 2016: 2024 – Do my homework – Help write my assignment online presidential election influence effort was its boldest to date in the United States. Moscow employed a multi-faceted approach intended to undermine confidence in our democratic process. . . . This Russian effort included the weaponization of stolen cyber information, the use of Russia’s English-language state media as a strategic messaging platform, and the mobilization of social media bots and trolls to spread disinformation and amplify Russian messaging.3

The extent of disinformation has been shocking. On Facebook, an estimated 126 million users might have been exposed to the fake ads and event posts produced by a Russian troll farm between 2015 – Research Paper Writing Help Service and 2017. According to a Facebook official, “Many of the ads and posts we’ve seen so far are deeply disturbing—seemingly intended to amplify societal divisions and pit groups of people against each other.”4 By 2018: 2024 – Write My Essay For Me | Essay Writing Service For Your Papers Online, Twitter had identified more than 3,100 Russian-linked troll accounts spreading divisive information during the 2016: 2024 – Do my homework – Help write my assignment online election, and said it had notified more than 677,000 people exposed to the fake messages.5 Google also found at least two phony Russian accounts and eighteen fake YouTube channels with forty-three hours of content.6

That’s what is known so far, as the U.S. Department of Justice continues its investigation. Russian trolls have also attempted to disrupt elections in the United Kingdom (where it tried to spread discord during the Brexit campaign), in France, and in several other European countries.

Because Europe has been dealing with Russian propaganda for decades, most of its nations have a head start on strategies to combat such disinformation. For example, in Sweden, there is a school literacy program to teach young people to identify Russian propaganda. Lithuania has citizen volunteers in the “Elves vs. Trolls” battle, with the good citizen investigators (elves) researching and revealing Russian trolls. Britain and France monitor Facebook closely and pressure the social media company to close down fake accounts. In Germany, political candidates all agreed not to use bots—fake accounts (mostly on Twitter) that make automated posts in an effort to boost a topic’s profile—in their political social media campaigns. In Slovakia, fourteen hundred advertisers have pulled their business from websites identified by researchers as the work of trolls. In Brussels, a European Union task force has published thousands of phony stories to reveal their deception. In nearly all European countries affected, fact-checking and investigative journalism are additional countermeasures to the Russian troll offensive.7

What ideas do you think would work best in America to combat political social media fraud?

CONVERGENCE AND MOBILE MEDIA
The innovation of digital communication enables all media content to be created in the same basic way, which makes media convergence, the technological merging of content in different mass media, possible.

In recent years, the Internet has become the hub for convergence, a place where music, television shows, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, books, games, and movies are created, distributed, and presented. Although convergence initially happened on desktop computers, the popularity of notebook computers and then the introduction of smartphones and tablets have hastened the pace of media convergence and made the idea of accessing any media content anywhere a reality.

Media Converges on Our PCs and TVs
First there was the telephone, invented in the 1870s. Then came radio in the 1920s, TV in the 1950s, and eventually the personal computer in the 1970s. Each device had its own unique and distinct function. Aside from a few exceptions, such as the clock radio, that was how electronic devices worked.

The rise of the personal computer industry in the mid-1970s first opened the possibility for unprecedented technological convergence. However, PC-based convergence didn’t truly materialize until a few decades later, when broadband Internet connections improved the multimedia capabilities of computers.

By the early 2000s, computers connected to the Internet allowed an array of digital media to converge in one space and be easily shared. Media are also converging on “smart” television sets that are manufactured to be Internet ready. Video game consoles like the Xbox One, Wii U, and PS4, and set-top devices like Apple TV, Google Chromecast, Roku, and Amazon Fire TV, offer additional entertainment-content access via their Internet connections. In the early years of the web, people would choose only one gateway to the Internet and media content, usually a computer or a television. Today, however, wireless networks and the recent technological developments in various media devices mean that consumers regularly use more than one avenue to access all types of media content.

Mobile Devices Propel Convergence
Mobile telephones have been around for decades (like the giant “brick” mobile phones of the 1970s and 1980s), but the smartphones of the twenty-first century are substantially different creatures. Introduced in 2002, the BlackBerry was the first popular Internet-capable smartphone in the United States. Mobile phones took another big leap in 2007 with Apple’s introduction of the iPhone, which combined qualities of its iPod digital music player with telephone and Internet service, all accessed through a sleek touchscreen. The next year, Apple opened its App Store, featuring free and low-cost software applications for the iPhone (and the iPod Touch and, later, the iPad) created by third-party developers, vastly increasing the utility of the iPhone.

A photo shows Amazon’s Echo smart speaker.

DEVICES LIKE AMAZON’S ECHO smart speaker allow users to control many aspects of their lives, such as playing music, ordering items, controlling their lights or thermostat, with just the sound of their voices.

In 2008 – Affordable Custom Essay Writing Service | Write My Essay from Pro Writers, the first smartphone to run on Google’s competing Android platform was released. By 2017, Android phones (sold by companies such as Samsung, HTC, LG, and Motorola, and supported by the Google Play app market and the Amazon Appstore) held 53.3 percent of the smartphone market share in the United States, while Apple’s iPhone had a 44.9 percent share; Microsoft and BlackBerry smartphones constituted the remainder of the market.16 The precipitous drop of the BlackBerry’s market standing (the company was late to add touchscreens and apps to its phones) illustrates the tumultuous competition among mobile devices.

In 2010 – Essay Writing Service: Write My Essay by Top-Notch Writer, Apple introduced the iPad, a tablet computer suitable for reading magazines, newspapers, and books; watching video; and using visual applications. The tablets became Apple’s fastest-growing product line, selling at a rate of twenty-five million a year. Apple added cameras, faster graphics, and a thinner design to subsequent generations of the iPad, as companies like Samsung (Galaxy), Amazon (Kindle Fire), Microsoft (Surface), and Google (Nexus) rolled out competing tablets.

The Impact of Media Convergence and Mobile Media
Convergence of media content and technology has forever changed our relationship with media. Today, media consumption is mobile and flexible; we don’t have to miss out on media content just because we aren’t home in time to catch a show, didn’t find the book at the bookstore, or forgot to buy the newspaper. Increasingly, we demand and are able to get access to media when we want it, where we want it, and in multiple formats. In order to satisfy those demands and to stay relevant in such a converged world, traditional media companies have had to dramatically change their approach to media content and their business models.

Our Changing Relationship with the Media
The merging of all media onto one device, such as a tablet, smartphone, or smartwatch, blurs the distinctions of what used to be separate media. For example, USA Today newspaper and CBS network television news used to deliver the news in completely different formats; today, however, their web formats look quite similar, with listings of headlines, rankings of the most popular stories, local weather forecasts, photo galleries, and video. New forms of media are constantly challenging old categories. Is listening to an hour-long podcast of public radio’s This American Life on a smartphone more like experiencing a radio program or more like experiencing an audio book?

Not only are the formats morphing, but we can now also experience the media in more than one manner simultaneously. Fans of television shows like This Is Us, The Walking Dead, and Stranger Things, or viewers of live events like NFL football, often multitask, reading live blogs during broadcasts or sharing their own commentary with friends on Facebook and Twitter. For those who miss the initial broadcasts, converged media offer a second life for media content through deep archive access and repurposed content on other platforms. For example, cable shows like Game of Thrones and Ripper Street have found audiences beyond their initial broadcasts through their DVD collections and online video services like Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and Hulu. This has also led to the resurrection and continuation of many TV shows that would have stayed canceled in the past—for example, Arrested Development’s revival on Netflix.

Our Changing Relationship with the Internet
Mobile devices and social media have altered our relationship with the Internet. Two trends are noteworthy: (1) Apple now makes more than eight times as much money selling iPhones, iPads, services, and accessories as it does selling computers, and (2) the number of Facebook users (more than two billion in 2018: 2024 – Write My Essay For Me | Essay Writing Service For Your Papers Online) keeps increasing. The significance of these two trends is that through Apple devices and Facebook, we now inhabit a different kind of Internet—what some call a closed Internet, or a walled garden.17

In a world where the small screens of smartphones are becoming the preferred medium for linking to the Internet, we typically don’t get the full, open Internet, one represented by the vast searches brought to us by Google. Instead, we get a more managed Internet, brought to us by apps or platforms that carry out specific functions via the Internet. Are you looking for a nearby restaurant? Don’t search on the Internet—use this app especially designed for that purpose. And the distributors of these apps often act as gatekeepers. Apple has more than 2.2 million apps in its App Store, and Apple approves every one of them. The competing Android app store on Google Play has 2.7 million apps, but Google exercises less control over approval of apps than Apple does.

Facebook offers a similar walled garden experience. Facebook began as a highly managed environment, only allowing those with .edu e-mail addresses. Although anyone can now join Facebook, the interface and the user experience on the site are still highly managed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his staff. For example, Facebook has installed measures to stop search engines from indexing users’ photos, Wall posts, videos, and other data. The effect of both Apple’s devices and the Facebook interface is a clean, orderly, easy-to-use environment but one in which we are “tethered” to the Apple App Store or to Facebook.18

The Changing Economics of Media and the Internet
The digital turn in the mass media has profoundly changed the economics of the Internet. Since the advent of Napster in 1999, which brought (illegal) file-sharing to the music industry, each media industry has struggled to rethink how to distribute its content for the digital age. The content itself remains important—people still want quality news, television, movies, music, and games—but they want it in digital formats and for mobile devices.

Apple’s response to Napster established the new media economics. Late Apple CEO Steve Jobs struck a deal with the music industry: Apple would provide a new market for music on the iTunes store, selling digital music that customers could play on their iPods (and later on their iPhones and iPads). In return, Apple got a 30 percent cut of the revenue for all music sales on iTunes, simply for being the “pipes” that delivered the music. As music stores went out of business all across America, Apple sold billions of songs and hundreds of millions of iPods, all without requiring a large chain of retail stores.

Amazon started as a more traditional online retailer, taking orders online and delivering merchandise from its warehouses. As books took the turn into the digital era, Amazon created its own device, the Kindle, and followed Apple’s model. Amazon started selling e-books, taking its cut for delivering the content. Along the way, Amazon and Apple (plus Google, Facebook, and Microsoft) have become leading media companies. They are among the top digital distributors of books, newspapers, magazines, music, television, movies, and games, and are now making their own content, too, including television, movies, digital games, and books.

The Next Era: The Semantic Web
Many Internet visionaries talk about the next generation of the Internet as the Semantic Web, a term that gained prominence after hypertext inventor Tim Berners-Lee and two coauthors published an influential article in a 2001 issue of Scientific American.19 If semantics is the study of meanings, then the Semantic Web is about creating a more meaningful—or more organized and trustworthy—web. To do that, the future promises a layered, connected database of information that software agents will sift through and process automatically for us. Whereas the search engines of today generate relevant web pages for us to read, the software of the Semantic Web will make our lives even easier as it places the basic information of the web into meaningful categories—family, friends, calendars, mutual interests, location—and makes significant connections for us.

The best example of the Semantic Web is Apple’s voice recognition assistant, Siri, first shipped with its iPhone 4S in 2011. Siri uses conversational voice recognition to answer questions, find locations, and interact with various iPhone functionalities, such as the calendar, reminders, the weather app, the music player, the web browser, and the maps function. Other Siri searches draw on the databases of external services, such as Yelp for restaurant locations and reviews, and StubHub for ticket information. Another example of the Semantic Web is the Samsung refrigerator that takes a photo of the interior every time the door closes. The owner may be away at the supermarket but can call up a photo of the interior to be reminded of what should be on the shopping list. The refrigerator can also be used to order groceries, with its built-in touchscreen and Wi-Fi connection.20 Voice recognition apps like Genie, Google Assistant, Cortana, and Bixby have brought voice recognition to Android devices as well. Voice recognition has also recently been pushed into a flourishing new market of home assistant and entertainment devices, like Amazon’s Echo speakers (with Amazon’s Alexa), Apple’s HomePod (with Siri), and Google Home (with Google Assistant).

A scene from the film Her.

THE SPIKE JONZE FILM HER (2013), set in the near future, explores the relationship between ahuman and an operating system. The voice-based operating system brings to mind Apple’s Siri, which moves users toward a deeper, more personally relevant web. Google Now and Microsoft Cortana are similar voice-activated personal digital assistants for mobile devices.

THE ECONOMICS AND ISSUES OF THE INTERNET
One of the unique things about the Internet is that no one owns it. But that hasn’t stopped some corporations from trying to control it. Since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 , which overhauled the nation’s communications regulations, most regional and long-distance phone companies and cable operators have competed against one another to provide connections to the Internet. However, there is more to controlling the Internet than being the service provider for it. Companies have realized the potential of dominating the Internet through search engines, software, social networking, and access to content, all in order to sell the essential devices that display the content or to amass users who become an audience for advertising.

Ownership and control of the Internet are connected to three Internet issues that command much public attention: the security of personal and private information, the appropriateness of online materials, and the accessibility and openness of the Internet. Important questions have been raised: Should personal or sensitive government information be private, or should the Internet be an enormous public record? Should the Internet be a completely open forum, or should certain types of communication be limited or prohibited? Should all people have equal access to the Internet, or should it be available only to those who can afford it? For each of these issues, there have been heated debates but no easy resolutions.

Ownership: Controlling the Internet
By the end of the 1990s, four companies—AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google—had emerged as the leading forces on the Internet. In today’s converged world, in which mobile access to digital content prevails, Microsoft and Google still remain powerful. Those two, along with Apple, Amazon, and Facebook, constitute the leading companies of digital media’s rapidly changing world. Of the five, all but Facebook also operate proprietary cloud services and encourage their customers to store all their files in their “walled garden” for easy access across all devices. This ultimately builds brand loyalty and generates customer fees for file storage.21

Microsoft, est. 1975
Microsoft, the oldest of the dominant digital firms (established by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975), is an enormously wealthy software company that struggled for years to develop an Internet strategy. As its software business declined, its flourishing digital game business (Xbox) allowed it to continue to innovate and find a different path to a future in digital media. The company finally found moderate success on the Internet with its search engine Bing in 2009. With the 2014: 2024 – Essay Writing Service. Custom Essay Services Cheap release of the Windows Phone 8 mobile operating system and the Surface tablet and lightweight laptop, Microsoft made headway in the mobile media business. In 2014: 2024 – Essay Writing Service | Write My Essay For Me Without Delay, Microsoft brought its venerable office software to mobile devices, with Office for iPad and Office Mobile for iPhones and Android phones, all of which work with OneDrive, Microsoft’s cloud service. Microsoft is also developing the HoloLens, a holographic computer operated via a headset.

Apple, est. 1976
Apple, Inc., was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976 as a home computer company. Apple was only moderately successful until 2001, when Jobs, having been forced out of the company for a decade, returned. Apple introduced the iPod and iTunes in 2003, two innovations that led the company to become the number one music retailer in the United States. Then in 2007, Jobs introduced the iPhone, transforming the mobile phone industry. The company further redefined wireless computing with the iPad in 2010 – Essay Writing Service: Write My Essay by Top-Notch Writer, the Apple Watch in 2015 – Research Paper Writing Help Service, and the Siri-controlled Apple HomePod in 2018: 2024 – Write My Essay For Me | Essay Writing Service For Your Papers Online.

With the iPhone and iPad now at the core of Apple’s business, the company expanded to include providing content—music, TV shows, movies, games, newspapers, magazines—to sell its media devices. The next wave of Apple’s innovations was the iCloud, a new storage and syncing service that enables users to access media content anywhere (with a wireless connection) on its mobile devices. The iCloud also helps ensure that customers purchase their media content through Apple’s iTunes store, further tethering users to its media systems. (For more on Apple devices and how they are made, see “Global Village: Designed in California, Assembled in China”.)

GLOBAL VILLAGE
Designed in California, Assembled in China

There is a now-famous story involving the release of the iPhone in 2007. The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs was carrying the prototype in his pocket about one month before its release and discovered that his keys, also in his pocket, were scratching the plastic screen. Known as a stickler for design perfection, Jobs reportedly gathered his fellow executives in a room and told them (angrily), “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”1 This demand would have implications for a factory complex in China, called Foxconn, where iPhones are assembled. When the order trickled down to a Foxconn supervisor, he woke up eight thousand workers in the middle of the night, gave them a biscuit and a cup of tea, then started them on twelve-hour shifts, fitting glass screens into the iPhone frames. Within four days, Foxconn workers were churning out ten thousand iPhones daily.

On its sleek packaging, Apple proudly proclaims that its products are “Designed by Apple in California”—a slogan that evokes beaches, sunshine, and Silicon Valley, where the best and brightest in American engineering ingenuity reside. The products also say, usually in a less visible location, “Assembled in China,” which suggests little except that the components of the iPhone, iPad, iPod, or Apple computer were put together in a factory in the world’s most populous country.

It wasn’t until 2014: 2024 – Essay Writing Service. Custom Essay Services Cheap that most Apple customers learned that China’s Foxconn was the company where their devices are assembled. Investigative reports by the New York Times revealed a company with ongoing problems in the areas of labor conditions and worker safety, including fatal explosions and a spate of worker suicides.2 (Foxconn responded in part by erecting nets around its buildings to prevent fatal jumps.)

Foxconn (also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., with headquarters in Taiwan) is China’s largest and most prominent private employer, with 1.2 million employees—more than any American company except Walmart. Foxconn assembles an incredible 40 percent of the world’s electronics and earns more revenue than ten of its competitors combined.3 And Foxconn is not just Apple’s favorite place to outsource production; nearly every global electronics company is connected to the manufacturing giant: Amazon (Kindle), Microsoft (Xbox), Sony (PlayStation), Dell, HP, IBM, Motorola, and Toshiba all feed their products to the vast Foxconn factory network.

Behind this manufacturing might is a network of factories now legendary for its enormity. Foxconn’s largest factory compound is in Shenzhen. Dubbed “Factory City,” the one-square-mile complex employs roughly 300,000 people, many of whom live in the dormitories (dorms sleep seven to a room) on the Foxconn campus.4 The workers, many of whom come from rural areas in China, often begin their shift at 4:00 A.M. and work until late at night, performing monotonous, routinized tasks—for example, filing the aluminum shavings from iPad casings six thousand times a day. Thousands of these full-time workers are under the age of eighteen.

A photo shows employees working in a clothing factory.

Conditions at Foxconn might, in some ways, be better than the conditions in the poverty-stricken small villages from which most of its workers come. But the low pay, long hours, dangerous work conditions, and suicide nets are likely not what the young workers had hoped for when they left their families behind.

In light of the news reports about the problems at Foxconn, Apple joined the Fair Labor Association (FLA), an international nonprofit that monitors labor conditions. The FLA inspected factories and surveyed more than thirty-five thousand Foxconn workers. Its 2014: 2024 – Essay Writing Service. Custom Essay Services Cheap study verified a range of serious issues. Workers regularly labored more than sixty hours per week, with some employees working more than seven days in a row. Other workers weren’t compensated for overtime. More than 43 percent of the workers reported they had witnessed or experienced an accident, and 64 percent of the workers surveyed said that the compensation does not meet their basic needs. In addition, the FLA found the labor union at Foxconn to be an unsatisfactory channel for addressing worker concerns, as representatives from management dominated the union’s membership.5

In 2014: 2024 – Essay Writing Service | Write My Essay For Me Without Delay, Apple reported that its supplier responsibility program had resulted in improved labor conditions at supplier factories. But Apple might not have taken any steps had it not been for the New York Times investigative reports and the intense public scrutiny that followed.

Investigative journalism and other reports have revealed a few more interesting things about Apple and Foxconn. First, as Citizens for Tax Justice reported, at the end of 2015 – Research Paper Writing Help Service (the most recent year data was available), more than three hundred top companies, including Apple, “collectively held $2.4 trillion offshore” to avoid paying taxes on it in the United States.6 These stockpiled profits deprived the United States of up to $695 billion in taxes—money that could be spent on schools, infrastructure, paying down the national debt, and so on. Apple led the list of corporations in 2015 – Research Paper Writing Help Service with $200.1 billion in income held offshore, skipping out on nearly $60.9 billion in U.S. tax collections. (Microsoft was also on the list, with $108.3 billion in income stashed offshore.)

Second, even though Apple is one of the wealthiest companies in the world, it regularly extracts concessions from states and municipalities for its building projects. For example, to get Apple to locate a $1.3 billion data center in Iowa in 2017, the state and the city of Waukee offered a package of $213 million in tax breaks and incentives. With the project creating only about fifty permanent jobs, it averaged out to a $4.26 million public subsidy for each job. At that same time, the state of Iowa was administering budget cuts for hundreds of millions of dollars in state revenue shortfalls. A Los Angeles Times headline summarized the situation: “Apple breaks new ground in squeezing locals for huge tax breaks while offering almost no jobs.”7

Foxconn also made news in 2017 in the United States with a proposed flat-screen assembly plant near Kenosha, Wisconsin. To lure the manufacturer to Wisconsin, the state offered Foxconn $3 billion in cash incentives and tax breaks, and suspended environmental regulations for the project.The Village of Mount Pleasant and Racine County offered an additional $764 million in support for a plant expected to create up to thirteen thousand jobs. The state’s public subsidy for each job is at least $230,700, assuming Foxconn creates the number of jobs anticipated. According to the state’s nonpartisan legislative fiscal bureau, Wisconsin’s $3 billion investment in the factory will not break even until the year 2042.8

The cases of Apple, Foxconn, and other companies raises the question: What is our role as citizens and consumers to ensure that digital companies are ethical and transparent in the treatment of the workers who make our electronic devices and in their financial dealings with our country and communities?

Amazon, est. 1995
Amazon started its business in 1995 in Seattle, selling the world’s oldest mass medium (books) online. Amazon has since developed into the world’s largest e-commerce store, selling not only books but also electronics, garden tools, clothing, appliances, and toys. Still, with the introduction of its Kindle e-reader in 2007, Amazon was following Apple’s model of using content to sell devices. The Kindle became the first widely successful e-reader, and by 2010 – Essay Writing Service: Write My Essay by Top-Notch Writer, e-books were outselling hardcovers and paperbacks at Amazon. In 2011, in response to Apple’s iPad, Amazon released its own color touchscreen tablet, the Kindle Fire, giving Amazon a device that can play all the media—including music, TV, movies, and games—it sells online and in its Appstore. Like Apple, Amazon has a Cloud Player for making media content portable. Amazon is now also competing with television, cable networks, and Netflix by producing Amazon Original television series for its streaming service and even breaking into feature films. In addition, Amazon’s Alexa-controlled Echo speakers have become the best-selling voice-assisted home digital assistant.

Google, est. 1998
Google, established in 1998, had instant success with its algorithmic search engine and now controls over 90 percent of the global search market, generating billions of dollars of revenue yearly through the pay-per-click advertisements that accompany key-word searches. Google has also branched out into a number of other Internet offerings, including Google Shopping, Google Maps, Gmail, Blogger, the Chrome browser, YouTube, the Chromecast television device, and Google Home. Google has also challenged Microsoft’s Office programs with Google Apps, a cloud-based bundle that includes word-processing, spreadsheet, calendar, messaging, and e-mail software. Google competes against Apple’s iTunes with Google Play, an online media store; challenges Facebook with the social networking tool Google+; and vies with Amazon’s voice-controlled Echo speakers with its own Google Home digital assistant.

A scene from the television series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

AFTER YEARS IN THE RETAIL BUSINESS, Amazon has been experimenting with content creation, commissioning groups of series, making the pilots available on its Amazon Prime streaming service, and taking both viewer and critical feedback into account when deciding which pilot episodes to expand into series. Transparent, about a family adjusting to a parent’s coming out as transgendered, established Amazon as a streaming video contender in 2014: 2024 – Essay Writing Service | Write My Essay For Me Without Delay. Its first season received eleven Emmy nominations. Amazon has developed other successful shows, including the award-winning series The Man in the High Castle and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (pictured). In addition, Amazon Studios was the first streaming service to receive an Academy Awards Best Picture nomination, for Manchester by the Sea in 2017.

Facebook, est. 2004
Established in 2004 by then-twenty-three-year-old Ace my homework – Write my essay – Harvard psychology major and avid computer programmer Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s immense, socially dynamic audience (about two-thirds of the U.S. population and more than 2.1 billion users around the globe)22 is its biggest resource. Like Google, it has become a data processor as much as a social media service, collecting every tidbit of information about its users—what we “Like,” where we live, what we read, and what we want—and selling this information to advertisers. Because Facebook users reveal so much about themselves in their profiles and the messages they share with others, Facebook can offer advertisers exceptionally tailored ads: A user who recently got engaged gets ads like “Impress Your Valentine,” “Vacation in Hawaii,” and “Are You Pregnant?” while a teenage girl sees ads for prom dresses, sweet-sixteen party venues, and “Chat with Other Teens” websites.

As a young company, Facebook has suffered growing pains while trying to balance its corporate interests (capitalizing on its millions of users) with its users’ interest in controlling the privacy of their own information. Facebook has focused on becoming more mobile with its purchase of Instagram in 2014: 2024 – Essay Writing Service. Custom Essay Services Cheap for $1 billion and its 2014: 2024 – Essay Writing Service | Write My Essay For Me Without Delay purchase of WhatsApp, a global instant messaging service. Facebook made its first major investment in hardware with its purchase of Oculus VR, a virtual reality technology company, for $2 billion in 2014: 2024 – Essay Writing Service | Write My Essay For Me Without Delay. The purchase set off a flurry of announcements and investments throughout the industry, as other digital companies aimed to compete with Facebook in the new virtual reality market.

An infographic titled Elsewhere in Media and Culture.

Targeted Advertising and Data Mining
In the early years of the web, advertising took the form of traditional display ads placed on pages. The display ads were no more effective than newspaper or magazine advertisements, and because they reached small, general audiences, they weren’t very profitable. But in the late 1990s, web advertising began to shift to search engines. Paid links appeared as “sponsored links” at the top, bottom, and side of a search engine result list and even, depending on the search engine, within the “objective” result list itself. Every time a user clicks on a sponsored link, the advertiser pays the search engine for the click-through. For online retailers, having paid placement in searches can be a good thing.

Advertising has since spread to other parts of the Internet, including social networking sites, e-mail, and mobile apps. For advertisers—who for years struggled with how to measure people’s attention to ads—these activities make advertising easy to track, effective in reaching the desired niche audience, and relatively inexpensive, since ads get wasted less often on uninterested parties. For example, Google scans the contents of Gmail messages; Facebook uses profile information, status updates, and “Likes” to deliver individualized, real-time ads to users’ screens; and Apple targets users through in-app ads. The rise in smartphone use has contributed to extraordinary growth in mobile advertising, which jumped from $3.4 billion in 2014: 2024 – Essay Writing Service. Custom Essay Services Cheap to $40 billion in 2017, and is predicted to reach $65 billion by 2020.23

Gathering users’ location and purchasing habits has been a boon for advertising, but these data-collecting systems also function as consumer surveillance and data mining operations. The practice of data mining also raises issues of Internet security and privacy. Millions of people have embraced the ease of e-commerce : the buying and selling of products and services on the Internet. What many people don’t know is that their personal information may be used without their knowledge. For example, in 2011, the Federal Trade Commission charged Facebook with a list of eight violations in which Facebook told consumers their information would be private but made it public to advertisers and third-party applications. Facebook settled with the FTC by fixing the problems and agreeing to submit to privacy audits through the year 2031.24 But, Facebook came under fire in 2018: 2024 – Write My Essay For Me | Essay Writing Service For Your Papers Online after it revealed that a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, gained access to 87 million Facebook user accounts, and after reports that Facebook also gave phone and device makers access to data on users and their friends.

One common method that commercial interests use to track the browsing habits of computer users is cookies , or information profiles that are automatically collected and transferred between computer servers whenever users access websites.25 The legitimate purpose of a cookie is to verify that a user has been cleared for access to a particular website, such as a library database that is open only to university faculty and students. However, cookies can also be used to create marketing profiles of web users to target them for advertising. Most commercial websites require the user to accept cookies in order to gain access to the site.

Even more unethical and intrusive is spyware , information-gathering software that is often secretly bundled with free downloaded software. Spyware can be used to send pop-up ads to users’ computer screens, to enable unauthorized parties to collect personal or account information of users, or even to plant a malicious click-fraud program on a computer, which generates phony clicks on web ads that force an advertiser to pay for each click.

In 1998, the FTC developed fair information practice principles for online privacy to address the unauthorized collection of personal data, requiring disclosure, consumer control of data, and prohibiting unauthorized use. Unfortunately, the FTC has no power to enforce these principles, and most websites did not enforce them.26 As a result, consumer and privacy advocates called for stronger regulations, such as requiring websites to adopt opt-in or opt-out policies . Opt-in policies, favored by consumer and privacy advocates, require websites to obtain explicit permission from consumers before the sites can collect browsing history data. Opt-out policies, favored by data-mining corporations, allow for the automatic collection of browsing history data unless the consumer requests to “opt out” of the practice. In 2014: 2024 – Essay Writing Service. Custom Essay Services Cheap, the FTC approved a report recommending that Congress adopt “Do Not Track” legislation to limit tracking of user information on websites and mobile devices and to enable users to easily opt out of data collection. Several web browsers now offer “Do Not Track” options, while other web tools, like Ghostery, detect web tags, bugs, and other trackers, generating a list of all the sites following your moves. On May 25, 2018: 2024 – Write My Essay For Me | Essay Writing Service For Your Papers Online, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became effective, requiring informed consent before data is collected on any user. The GDPR also has new, stronger penalties for violations. Although the GDPR only applies to EU citizens, the rules became the default standard for global Internet companies, and many companies operating in the U.S. sent out notices to customers about their updated privacy policies.

Security: The Challenge to Keep Personal Information Private
When you watch television, listen to the radio, read a book, or go to the movies, you do not need to provide personal information to others. However, when you use the Internet, whether you are signing up for an e-mail account, shopping online, or even just surfing the web, you give away personal information—voluntarily or not. As a result, government surveillance, online fraud, and unethical data-gathering methods have become common, making the Internet a potentially treacherous place.

MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS
Note to Self for Healthy Digital Consumption

Note to Self with Manoush Zomorodi is a popular podcast about digital culture from WNYC public radio. Zomorodi questions common assumptions about tech culture, and offers a set of media literacy challenges to help us use technology more mindfully. How can we make information overload disappear and enjoy healthier digital consumption?

To answer these questions, get ready for the five-day “Infomagical” challenge. * Search “wnycinfomagical” for a project overview and links to instructions for each day of the challenge. Begin by clicking on “Why Infomagical” to access Note to Self ’s “The Case for Infomagical” podcast to understand how to participate. Then pick a concrete goal for the week from the following list.

· I want to be more creative.

· I want to be more up to date on current events.

· I want to be more connected to friends and family.

· I want to be more focused on one topic or skill (pick one).

· I want to be more in tune with myself.

You will want to stick with this goal the entire week.

Beginning on Monday, follow the basic instructions below. Every page on the Infomagical website contains helpful information and a worthwhile seven- to fourteen-minute podcast.

MONDAY, Day 1: “Magical Day”

The first challenge is about multitasking. Your instructions are to only do one thing at a time, because studies have shown us that our brain actually can’t process more than one task simultaneously. We are, in fact, far more productive when we singletask. And yet most of us are so prone to multitasking we don’t even think twice about it.

Here are the basic Monday instructions from Note to Self:

All day long, do just one thing at a time. If you catch yourself doing two things, switch your focus back to one. Don’t read an article and Tweet about it—read it, then Tweet. Ace my homework – Write an e-mail until you’ve finished it and hit “send.” Perhaps even take a moment to just drink your coffee. Use your Infomagical week goal to prioritize which thing to do when.

TUESDAY, Day 2: “Magical Phone”

The second challenge is about de-cluttering. Many of the apps on our phones are no longer useful to us, or maybe they no longer spark joy when we use them. Organizing our apps by concentrating on what to keep (rather than what to throw away) is a mindful exercise toward making our devices more task oriented. Think about this: Will uncluttering our apps, as Zomorodi suggests we do, also unclutter our brain?

Here are the basic Tuesday instructions from Note to Self:

Today, you will rearrange the apps on your phone. You do not necessarily need to delete anything. You just need to weigh the value of each one, delete the ones that (a) you do not use or (b) do not bring you joy. Pull all your remaining apps into folders—ideally, just one folder. When you’ve finished, set your phone’s background wallpaper to an image that reminds you of your Infomagical week goal.

WEDNESDAY, Day 3: “Magical Brain”

The third challenge is about avoiding the emotional labor of keeping up with everything. Because information overload is both draining and stimulating, the goal here is to focus on only those things that actually matter to you. And in return for concentrating on your information choices, Zomorodi states, “You are going to reveal your brain’s hidden capabilities.”

Here are the basic Wednesday instructions from Note to Self:

Today, you will avoid clicking on something “everyone is talking about” unless it contributes to your information goal. This might be a trending topic or a “must read” or whichever article or video or .GIF everyone in your world is sharing. You’ve got a strict rule in place: “If this does not make me [insert your Infomagical week goal here], I won’t click.”

THURSDAY, Day 4: “Magical Connection”

The fourth challenge is about having meaningful conversations and trying out the seven-minute rule. According to social psychologist Sherry Turkle, we can only decide if a face-to-face conversation is “interesting” after we engage in it for seven minutes (or more). But today we are so impatient with—and afraid of—conversation lulls or any kind of awkwardness (inevitable with face-to-face talk, right?) that we avoid these discussions altogether. Students even avoid visiting their professors during office hours because it just seems easier to send an e-mail. But as a result, we are missing out on the meaningful bits. Today, your goal is to skip the texting and e-mail and make at least one magical face-to-face connection.

Here are the basic Thursday instructions from Note to Self:

Do something with all that wonderful goal-oriented information you’ve been consuming. Ace my homework – Write my paper – Online assignment help tutors – Discuss something you’ve heard/read/watched with someone by phone or in person for at least seven minutes.

FRIDAY, Day 5: “Magical Life”

The fifth challenge is about making technology serve you, instead of the other way around.

Here are the basic Friday instructions from Note to Self:

Apply whatever you learned or observed about yourself, and think about how to apply this magical feeling going forward. How can you use the idea of creating a priority, a goal, to create a magical life?

How was it? What did you learn? As Note to Self ’s Zomorodi suggests, try to come up with a broader goal for tackling information overload (this can even be a sort of mantra). Put it on a sticky note, and affix it to your laptop. Here are two of her examples: Spend forty-five minutes of each hour online working or doing homework, and reserve the other fifteen minutes for fun; or think more about what you read. Perhaps you may want to give face-to-face conversations more of a try; or your mantra could be: “Read more [], text less,” and talk, face-to-face, about your newfound ideas with your friends. Whatever you decide to do personally, bring your collective experiences to the entire class and have a class-wide discussion about digital technology and making information overload a thing of the past.

* NOTE: The project on the WNYC website is no longer interactive, so you don’t have to sign up and “Join Infomagical.”

A New Yorker cartoon labeled The Ungooglable Man.

THIS NEW YORKER CARTOON illustrates an increasingly rare phenomenon.

Government Surveillance
Since the inception of the Internet, government agencies worldwide have obtained communication logs, web browser histories, and the online records of individual users who thought their online activities were private. In the United States, for example, the USA PATRIOT Act (which became law about a month after the September 11 attacks in 2001, with most provisions renewed in 2006 – Write a paper; Professional research paper writing service – Best essay writers, 2011, and 2015 – Research Paper Writing Help Service) grants sweeping powers to law-enforcement agencies to intercept individuals’ online communications, including e-mail and browsing records. The act was intended to allow the government to more easily uncover and track potential terrorists, but many now argue that it is too vaguely worded, allowing the government to unconstitutionally probe the personal records of citizens without probable cause and for reasons other than preventing terrorism. Moreover, searches of the Internet permit law-enforcement agencies to gather huge amounts of data, including the communications of people who are not the targets of an investigation. Documents leaked to the news media in 2013 by former CIA employee and former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA has continued its domestic spying program, collecting bulk Internet and mobile phone data on millions of Americans for more than a decade.

Online Fraud
In addition to being an avenue for surveillance, the Internet is increasingly a conduit for online robbery and identity theft, the illegal obtaining of personal credit and identity information in order to fraudulently spend other people’s money. Computer hackers have the ability to infiltrate Internet databases (from banks to hospitals to even the Pentagon) to obtain personal information and to steal credit card numbers from online retailers. Identity theft victimizes hundreds of thousands of people a year, and clearing one’s name can take a very long time and cost a lot of money. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, about 6.15 percent of Americans were victims of identity theft in 2017, totaling about $16 billion in losses.27 One particularly costly form of Internet identity theft is known as phishing . This scam involves phony e-mail messages that appear to be from official websites—such as eBay, PayPal, or the user’s university or bank—asking customers to update their credit card numbers, account passwords, and other personal information.

Appropriateness: What Should Be Online?
The question of what constitutes appropriate content has been part of the story of most mass media, from debates over the morality of lurid pulp-fiction books in the nineteenth century to arguments over the appropriateness of racist, sexist, and homophobic content in films and music. Although it is not the only material to come under intense scrutiny, most of the debate about appropriate media content, despite the medium, has centered on sexually explicit imagery.

As has always been the case, eliminating some forms of sexual content from books, films, television, and other media remains a top priority for many politicians and public interest groups. So it should not be surprising that public objection to indecent and obscene Internet content has led to various legislative efforts to tame the web. Although the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 were both judged unconstitutional, the Children’s Internet Protection Act of 2000 was passed and upheld in 2003. This act requires schools and libraries that receive federal funding for Internet access to use software that filters out any visual content deemed obscene, pornographic, or harmful to minors unless disabled at the request of adult users. Regardless of new laws, pornography continues to flourish on commercial sites, individuals’ blogs, and social networking pages. As the American Library Association notes, there is “no filtering technology that will block out all illegal content, but allow access to constitutionally protected materials.”28

In addition to those sites featuring sexual content, Internet sites that carry potentially dangerous information (bomb-building instructions, hate speech) have also incited calls for Internet censorship, particularly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, several tragic school shootings, and the rise in hate speech in recent years. Nevertheless, many people—fearing that government regulation of speech would inhibit freedom of expression in a democratic society—want the web to be completely unregulated.

Access: The Fight to Prevent a Digital Divide
A key economic issue related to the Internet is whether the cost of purchasing a personal computer and paying for Internet services will undermine equal access. Coined to echo the term economic divide (the disparity of wealth between the rich and the poor), the term digital divide refers to the growing contrast between the “information haves”—those who can afford to purchase computers and pay for Internet services—and the “information have-nots”—those who may not be able to afford a computer or pay for Internet services.

About 89 percent of U.S. households are connected to the Internet, but there are big gaps in access to advanced broadband service. For example, about 73 percent of Americans have home broadband service, but there is a large gap according to income: 93 percent of adults with household incomes of $75,000 or more have home broadband, whereas only 53 percent of adults with household incomes less than $30,000 have it. There is also a difference when it comes to the type of community, with broadband in 76 percent of suburban households, 73 percent of urban households, and 63 percent of rural households.29 Although not a perfect substitute for a home broadband connection, smartphones are helping narrow the digital divide. The mobile phone industry forecasts that smartphone use in the United States will increase from 78 percent in 2016: 2024 – Do my homework – Help write my assignment online to 81 percent by 2020, bringing more small-screen data connections to users.30 The industry will begin to roll out the next generation of mobile phone data speeds—5G connections—in 2019: 2024 – Online Assignment Homework Writing Help Service By Expert Research Writers.

A photo shows a high altitude balloon used by Google in its Project Loon.

GOOGLE’S PROJECT LOON employs maneuverable high-altitude balloons that transmit wireless signals to Internet service providers across the globe. The project, which began in 2011, aims to provide Internet access to people in remote areas who would otherwise have no way of getting online. In its mission statement, Google cites the growing digital divide as its reason for launching the project: “Many of us think of the Internet as a global community. But two-thirds of the world’s population does not yet have Internet access.”

Globally, though, the have-nots face an even greater obstacle to crossing the digital divide. Although the web claims to be worldwide, the most economically powerful countries—the United States, Sweden, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the United Kingdom—account for most of its international flavor. In nations such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Myanmar (Burma), the government permits limited or no access to the web. In other countries, an inadequate telecommunications infrastructure hampers access to the Internet. And in underdeveloped countries, phone lines and computers are almost nonexistent. For example, in Eritrea—an East African nation of about 6.5 million people, with poor public utilities and intermittent electrical service—about 71,000 people, or about 1.3 percent of the population, are Internet users.31 However, as mobile phones become more popular in the developing world, they can provide one remedy for the global digital divide.

Even as the Internet matures and becomes more accessible, wealthy users are still able to buy higher levels of privacy and faster speeds of Internet access than are other users. Whereas traditional media made the same information available to everyone who owned a radio or a TV set, the Internet creates economic tiers and classes of service. Policy groups, media critics, and concerned citizens continue to debate the implications of the digital divide, valuing the equal opportunity to acquire knowledge.

Net Neutrality: Maintaining an Open Internet
For more than a decade, the debate over net neutrality has framed the shape of the Internet’s future. Net neutrality refers to the principle that every website and every user—whether a multinational corporation or you—has the right to the same Internet network speed and access. The idea of an open and neutral network has existed since the origins of the Internet, but there had never been a legal formal policy until 2015 – Research Paper Writing Help Service, when the Federal Communications Commission reclassified broadband Internet service and approved net neutrality rules.32 Still, the debate forges on.

The dispute is dominated by some of the biggest communications corporations. These major telephone and cable companies—including Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, Spectrum, and Cox—control 98 percent of broadband access in the United States through DSL and cable modem service. They want to offer faster connections and priority to clients willing to pay higher rates, and provide preferential service for their own content or for content providers who make special deals with them, effectively eliminating net neutrality. For example, tiered Internet access might mean that these companies would charge customers more for data-heavy services like Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu. These companies argue that the profits they could make from tiered Internet access would allow them to build expensive new networks, benefiting everyone.

But supporters of net neutrality—such as bloggers, video gamers, educators, religious groups, unions, and small businesses—argue that the cable and telephone giants have incentive to rig their services and cause net congestion in order to force customers to pay a premium for higher-speed connections. They claim that an Internet without net neutrality would hurt small businesses, nonprofits, and Internet innovators, who might be stuck in the “slow lane,” not being able to afford the same connection speeds that large corporations can afford. Large Internet corporations like Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, Skype, and Facebook also support net neutrality because their businesses depend on their millions of customers’ having equal access to the web.

When Donald Trump became president in 2017, he appointed a new chairperson of the FCC, former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai. On December 14, 2017, the FCC voted to repeal the 2015 – Research Paper Writing Help Service FCC net neutrality policy on a three-to-two party-line vote. Yet after twelve years of debate about net neutrality, the battle continued. In January 2018: 2024 – Write My Essay For Me | Essay Writing Service For Your Papers Online, attorneys general from twenty-one states and the District of Columbia filed lawsuits to challenge the decision, stating that the FCC vote to repeal net neutrality was “arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion.” The governor of Montana went one step further and ordered ISPs that have contracts with the state to follow net neutrality principles.33

Alternative Voices
Independent programmers continue to invent new ways to use the Internet and communicate over it. While some of their innovations have remained free of corporate control, others have been taken over by commercial interests. Despite commercial buyouts, however, the pioneering spirit of the Internet’s independent early days endures; the Internet continues to be a participatory medium in which anyone can be involved. Two of the most prominent areas in which alternative voices continue to flourish relate to open-source software and digital archiving.

Open-Source Software
In the early days of computer code writing, amateur programmers were developing open-source software on the principle that it was a collective effort. They openly shared program source codes along with their ideas for upgrading and improving programs. Beginning in the 1970s, Microsoft put an end to much of this activity by transforming software development into a business in which programs were developed privately and users were required to pay for both the software and its periodic upgrades.

However, programmers are still developing noncommercial, open-source software, if on a more limited scale. One open-source operating system, Linux, was established in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, a twenty-one-year-old student at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Since the establishment of Linux, professional computer programmers and hobbyists around the world have participated in improving it, creating a sophisticated software system that even Microsoft has acknowledged is a credible alternative to expensive commercial programs. Linux can operate across disparate platforms, and companies such as IBM, Dell, and Oracle, as well as other corporations and governmental organizations, have developed applications and systems that run on it. Still, the greatest impact of Linux is evident not on the desktop screens of everyday computer users but in the operation of behind-the-scenes computer servers.

Digital Archiving
Librarians have worked tirelessly to build nonprofit digital archives that exist outside of any commercial system in order to preserve libraries’ tradition of open access to information. One of the biggest and most impressive digital preservation initiatives is the Internet Archive, established in 1996. The Internet Archive aims to ensure that researchers, historians, scholars, and all citizens have universal access to human knowledge—that is, everything that’s digital: text, moving images, audio, software, and more than 466 billion archived web pages reaching back to the earliest days of the Internet. The archive is growing at a staggering rate, as the general public and partners such as the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress upload cultural artifacts. For example, the Internet Archive stores more than 186,000 live music concerts, including performances by Jack Johnson, the Grateful Dead, and the Smashing Pumpkins.

Media activist David Bollier has likened open-access initiatives to an information “commons,” underscoring the idea that the public collectively owns (or should own) certain public resources, like the airwaves, the Internet, and public spaces (such as parks). Says Bollier, “Libraries are one of the few, if not the key, public institutions defending popular access and sharing of information as a right of all citizens, not just those who can afford access.”34

THE INTERNET AND DEMOCRACY
Throughout the twentieth century, Americans closely examined emerging mass media for their potential contributions to democracy. Radio and television each developed with the promise of being able to reach everyone, even poor or illiterate citizens. Despite continuing concerns over the digital divide, many have praised the Internet for its democratic possibilities. Some advocates even tout the Internet as the most democratic social network ever conceived.

The biggest threat to the Internet’s democratic potential may well be its increasing commercialization. As happened with radio and television, the growth of commercial “channels” on the Internet has far outpaced the emergence of viable nonprofit channels, as fewer and fewer corporations have gained more and more control. The passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act cleared the way for cable TV systems, computer firms, and telephone companies to merge their interests and become even larger commercial powers. Although there was a great deal of buzz about lucrative Internet start-ups in the 1990s and 2000s, it has been large corporations—such as Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook—that have weathered the low points of the dot-com economy and maintained a controlling hand. If the histories of other media are any predictor, it seems realistic to expect that the Internet’s potential for widespread use by all could be partially preempted by narrower commercial interests.

However, defenders of the digital age argue that inexpensive digital production and social media distribution allow greater participation than does any traditional medium. In response to these new media forms, older media are using Internet technology to increase their access to and feedback from varied audiences. Skeptics raise doubts about the participatory nature of discussions on the Internet. For instance, they warn that Internet users may be communicating with people whose beliefs and values are similar to their own. Although it is important to be able to communicate across vast distances with people who have similar viewpoints, these kinds of discussions may not serve to extend the diversity and tolerance that are central to democratic ideals. There are also those who may not be interacting with anyone at all. In the wide world of the web, we are in a shared environment of billions of people. In the emerging ecosystem of apps, we live in an efficient but gated community, walled off from the rest of the Internet. However, we are still in the early years of the Internet. The democratic possibilities of the Internet’s future are endless.

Chapter 2 Review
COMMON THREADS
One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is the commercial nature of mass media. The Internet is no exception, as advertisers have capitalized on its ability to be customized. How might this affect other media industries?

People love the simplicity of Pinterest, the visual social media site where users “pin” images and videos to their “board,” creating a customized site that reflects their own personal style on topics like home décor, apparel, food, crafts, or travel. To sign up for an account, users provide their name, e-mail address, and gender (male or female). The final choice is prechecked by Pinterest and says, “Let Pinterest personalize your experience based on other sites you visit.”

Pinterest is just one example of the mass customization the Internet offers—something no other mass medium has been able to provide. (When is the last time a television set, radio, newspaper, or movie spoke directly to you or let you be the content producer?) This is one of the web’s greatest strengths—it can connect us to the world in a personally meaningful way. But a casualty of the Internet may be our shared common culture. A generation ago, students and coworkers across the country gathered on Friday mornings to discuss what happened the previous night on NBC’s “must-see” TV shows, like Roseanne, Seinfeld, Friends, and Will & Grace. Today, it’s more likely that they watched vastly different media the night before. And if they did view the same thing—say, a funny YouTube video—it’s likely they all laughed alone because they watched it individually, although they may have later shared it with their friends on a social media site.

We have become a society divided by the media, often split into our basic entity: the individual. One would think that advertisers dislike this, since it is easier to reach a mass audience by showing commercials during The Voice. But mass customization gives advertisers the kind of personal information they once only dreamed about: your e-mail address, hometown, zip code, and birthday, and a record of your interests—what web pages you visit and what you buy online. If you have a Facebook profile or a Gmail account, they may know even more about you—what you did last night or what you are doing right now. What will advertisers have the best chance of selling to you with all this information? With the mass-customized Internet, you may have already told them.

KEY TERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.

· digital turn

· Internet

· ARPAnet

· microprocessors

· fiber-optic cable

· World Wide Web

· HTML (hypertext markup language)

· browsers

· Internet service provider (ISP)

· broadband

· digital communication

· search engines

· Telecommunications Act of 1996

· data mining

· e-commerce

· cookies

· spyware

· opt-in or opt-out policies

· phishing

· digital divide

· net neutrality

· open-source software

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For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to media-related websites, and more, go to launchpadworks.com .

REVIEW QUESTIONS
The Development of the Internet and the Web

1. When did the Internet reach the novelty (emergence), entrepreneurial, and mass medium stages?

2. How did the Internet originate? What role did the government play?

3. How does the World Wide Web work? What is its significance in the development of the Internet?

4. Why did Google become such a force in web searching?

Social Media and Democracy

5. What are the democratic possibilities of social media? How can social media aid political repression?

Convergence and Mobile Media

6. What conditions enabled media convergence?

7. What role do mobile devices play in media convergence, and what significant mobile milestones can you think of?

8. How has convergence changed our relationship with media and with the Internet?

9. What elements of today’s digital world are part of the Semantic Web?

The Economics and Issues of the Internet

10. Which of the five major digital companies are most aligned with the “open Internet,” and which are most aligned with the “closed Internet”?

11. What is the role of data mining in the digital economy? What are the ethical concerns?

12. What is the digital divide, and what is being done to close the gap?

13. Why is net neutrality such an important issue?

14. What are the major alternative voices on the Internet?

The Internet and Democracy

15. How can the Internet make democracy work better?

16. What are the key challenges to making the Internet itself more democratic?

QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
1. What possibilities for the Internet’s future are you most excited about? Why? What possibilities are most troubling? Why?

2. What advantages of media convergence enable all types of media content to be accessed on a single device?

3. Google’s corporate motto is “Don’t be evil.” Which of the five major digital corporations (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook) seems to have the greatest tendency for evil? Which seems to do the most good? Why?

4. In the move from a print-oriented Industrial Age to a digitally based Information Age, how do you think individuals, communities, and nations have been affected positively? How have they been affected negatively?

LAUNCHPAD FOR MEDIA & CULTURE
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture at launchpadworks.com for additional learning tools:

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· Editors, producers, and advertisers discuss the varieties of user-generated content and how it can contribute to the democratization of media.