Open Source Democracy | Page 6

discussions about thousands of different
topics. They themselves spawned communities of scientists, activists,
doctors, and patients, among so many others, dedicated to tackling
problems in collaboration across formerly prohibitive geographical and
cultural divides.

The Backlash
These new communities are perhaps why the effects of the remote,
joystick and mouse represented such a tremendous threat to business as
usual. Studies in the mid-1990s showed that families with
internet-capable computers were watching an average of nine hours less
television per week. Even more frightening to those who depended on
the mindless passivity of consumer culture, internet enthusiasts were
sharing information, ideas and whole computer programs for free!
Software known as 'freeware' and 'shareware' gave rise to a gift
economy based on community and mutual self-interest. People were
turning to alternative news and entertainment sources, which they didn't
have to pay for. Worse, they were watching fewer commercials.
Something had to be done. And it was.
It is difficult to determine exactly how intentional each of the
mainstream media's attacks were on the development of the internet
and the culture it spawned. Certainly, the many executives of media
conglomerates who contacted my colleagues and I for advice
throughout the 1990s were both threatened by the unchecked growth of
interactive culture and anxious to cash in on these new developments.
They were chagrined by the flow of viewers away from television
programming, but they hoped this shift could be managed and
ultimately exploited. While many existing content industries, such as
the music recording industry, sought to put both individual companies
and entire new categories out of business (such as Napster and other
peer-to-peer networks), the great majority of executives did not want to
see the internet entirely shut down. It was, in fact, the US government,
concerned about the spread of pornography to minors and encryption
technology to rogue nations, that took more direct actions against the
early internet's new model of open collaboration.
Although many of the leaders and top shareholders of global media
conglomerates felt quite threatened by the rise of new media, their
conscious efforts to quell the unchecked spread of interactive
technology were not the primary obstacles to the internet's natural
development. A review of articles quoting the chiefs at TimeWarner,

Newscorp, and Bertelsman reveals an industry either underestimating
or simply misunderstanding the true promise of interactive media.
The real attacks on the emerging new media culture were not
orchestrated by old men from high up in glass office towers but arose
almost as systemic responses from an old media culture responding to
the birth of its successor. It was both through the specific, if misguided,
actions of some media executives, as well as the much more unilateral
response of an entire media culture responding to a threat to the status
quo, that mainstream media began to reverse the effects of the remote,
the joystick and the mouse.
Borrowing a term from 1970s social science, media business advocates
declared that we were now living in an 'attention economy'. True
enough, the mediaspace might be infinite but there are only so many
hours in a day during which potential audience members might be
viewing a program. These units of human time became known as
eyeball-hours, and pains were taken to create TV shows and web sites
'sticky' enough to engage those eyeballs long enough to show them an
advertisement.
Perhaps coincidentally, the growth of the attention economy was
accompanied by an increase of concern over the attention spans of
young people. Channel surfing and similar behaviour became equated
with a very real but variously diagnosed childhood illness called
Attention Deficit Disorder. Children who refused to pay attention were
(much too quickly) drugged with addictive amphetamines before the
real reasons for their adaptation to the onslaught of commercial
messages were even considered.
The demystification of media, enabled by the joystick and other early
interactive technologies, was quickly reversed through the development
of increasingly opaque computer interfaces. While early DOS computer
users tended to understand a lot about how their computers stored
information and launched programs, later operating systems such as
Windows 95 put more barriers in place. Although these operating
systems make computers easier to use in some ways, they prevent users
from gaining access or command over its more intricate processes.

Now, to install a new program, users must consult the 'wizard'. What
better metaphor do we need for the remystification of the computer?
Computer literacy no longer means being able to program a computer,
but merely knowing how to use software such as Microsoft Office.
Finally, the do-it-yourself ethic of the internet community was replaced
by the new value of commerce. The communications age was
rebranded as the information age, even though the internet had never
really been about downloading files or data, but about communicating
with other people. The difference was that