"Every Home Is Wired": 1 -- The Net in Relation to Music Subcultures

"Every Home Is Wired":
1 -- The Net in Relation to Music Subcultures

Music in the Information Age
Music is central to popular culture, and intimately connected to the trends within it: as Attali writes, "music runs parallel to human society, is structured like it, and changes when it does. It ... is caught up in the complexity and circularity of the movements of history" (10). As we move into what is now usually called the 'information age', then, music as such and the music industry are likely to experience, but also foreshadow certain fundamental changes in society related to that beginning age, and here particularly to the first major medium of this new period of human history -- the Internet.	Bit 4
The Net exhibits a number of characteristics which set it apart from the traditional media. Centrally, it is the first mass-access medium where the public can actively and publicly -- in contrast to the mere one-to-one communication of media like the telephone, for example -- participate in large numbers (where access is available, and thus excluding for the moment underprivileged individuals and communities, as well as remote areas). It therefore has the potential to give the 'average' member of the public, so far virtually excluded from topic-setting participation in the mainstream media, their say; thus, "critical to the rhetoric surrounding the information highway is the promise of a renewed sense of community and, in many instances, new types and formations of community" (Jones 11).	Bit 5

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