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

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

The Internet, too, could be handled much more efficiently by the industry if it was geared to serve mass audiences instead of highly segmentalised groups; Herman & McChesney thus reveal industry desires rather than actual fact when they claim that "regardless of the technology, the highly open, egalitarian, and competitive nature of the Internet is being undermined by market forces even before it approaches being a mass medium" (124). The two mistakes in this view are, of course, that it overestimates the ability of 'market forces' to survey, let alone influence or control the interaction and information that takes place, for example, in the multitudes of specialised newsgroups and Web sites, and that this view still expects the Net to develop into a mass medium in the traditional definition of the term -- something it cannot and does not even aim to do. In order to come to terms with the Internet, the entertainment industry will have to realise these misapprehensions (and has done so, in parts) -- as Negroponte points out, "being digital will change the nature of mass media from a process of pushing bits at people to one of allowing people (or their computers) to pull at them. ... As media companies go more and more toward narrowcasting, ... they are still pushing bits at a special-interest group... . The information industry will become more of a boutique business. Its marketplace is the global information highway" (84-5).	Bit 32

The Internet, too, could be handled much more efficiently by the industry if it was geared to serve mass audiences instead of highly segmentalised groups; Herman & McChesney thus reveal industry desires rather than actual fact when they claim that "regardless of the technology, the highly open, egalitarian, and competitive nature of the Internet is being undermined by market forces even before it approaches being a mass medium" (124). The two mistakes in this view are, of course, that it overestimates the ability of 'market forces' to survey, let alone influence or control the interaction and information that takes place, for example, in the multitudes of specialised newsgroups and Web sites, and that this view still expects the Net to develop into a mass medium in the traditional definition of the term -- something it cannot and does not even aim to do. In order to come to terms with the Internet, the entertainment industry will have to realise these misapprehensions (and has done so, in parts) -- as Negroponte points out, "being digital will change the nature of mass media from a process of pushing bits at people to one of allowing people (or their computers) to pull at them. ... As media companies go more and more toward narrowcasting, ... they are still pushing bits at a special-interest group... . The information industry will become more of a boutique business. Its marketplace is the global information highway" (84-5).

Bit 32

Section 1 -- Go on to Bite:

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31	32	33	34	35