The next decade in internet

This article was downloaded by: [188.25.224.109]On: 12 December 2012, At: 13:23Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

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THE NEXT DECADE IN INTERNETTIMELeah A. Lievrouw aa Department of Information Studies, University ofCalifornia, Los Angeles, 216 GSE&IS Building, Box951520, Los Angeles, CA, 90095-1520, USAVersion of record first published: 18 Apr 2012.

To cite this article: Leah A. Lievrouw (2012): THE NEXT DECADE IN INTERNET TIME,Information, Communication & Society, 15:5, 616-638

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.675691

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Leah A. Lievrouw

THE NEXT DECADE IN INTERNET TIME

Ways ahead for new media studies

In this paper, three features of the Internet/new media that have developed over thelast decade are discussed: the relational Internet, the enclosed Internet, and the‘mean world’ Internet. These features correspond to the three interrelated elementsof new media infrastructure: the practices in which people engage to interact and shareinformation and meaning; the tools, devices, or artifacts that people create and use inorder to do so; and the social arrangements or institutional forms that develop out ofand around those practices and tools. Together, the three features have had an impor-tant influence on the ways that new media are understood and used and have helpedshift popular discourses and the study of new media from an emphasis on possibility,novelty, adaptability, and openness toward greater preoccupations with risk, conflict,vulnerability, routinization, stability, and control. Given these conditions, the authorproposes that three problem areas – again corresponding to practices, tools, and socialarrangements – may be important directions for new media studies over the ‘nextdecade in Internet time’. Network literacies and pedagogies that prepare individ-uals to be full and effective participants in society, politics, and culture must be devel-oped and implemented. Dead media may pose increasing challenges to sustainablecultural heritage as well as to ever more intrusive regimes of total surveillance andcapture of personal information, enabling a ‘right to be forgotten’. Commonsknowledge projects may challenge and even reconfigure the foundations of insti-tutional authority, expertise, legitimacy, and power.

Keywords communication studies; cyberculture; ICTs; mobiletechnology; surveillance/privacy

(Received 17 November 2011; final version received 12 March 2012)

Introduction

‘The Internet’ is now over 40 years old. While many early visions and expec-tations for networked computing and telecommunications have been realized,numerous others (for both good and ill) that the original developers of the

Information, Communication & Society Vol. 15, No. 5, June 2012, pp. 616–638

ISSN 1369-118X print/ISSN 1468-4462 online # 2012 Leah A. Lievrouw

http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.675691

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system could scarcely have imagined have emerged. Some of the most significantchanges have only appeared in the decade since the Oxford Internet Institute waslaunched.

In this paper, I begin with a discussion of three features of the current Inter-net/new media ‘landscape’ that have emerged over the last decade: the relationalInternet, the increasingly interpersonal and personally customized character ofonline and mobile communication; the enclosed Internet resulting fromgrowing technological and legal restrictions on new media devices andsystems; and the ‘mean world’ Internet, the sense of risk and exposure onlinethat has been used to justify the expansion of increasingly invasive private andstate surveillance/security regimes. These conditions have helped shift popularperceptions of online communication and discourses about new media from alongstanding emphasis on possibility, novelty, adaptability, and opennesstoward current preoccupations with risk, conflict, vulnerability, routinization,stability, and control. They have also fundamentally shaped the study and under-standing of networked media and information technologies and their social andcultural significance and consequences, as well as the actual use of communi-cation technologies in everyday social, economic, and cultural life.

The relational, enclosed, and ‘mean world’ characteristics can be under-stood as manifestations of the co-determining triad of practices, tools, andsocial arrangements, which comprise the core elements of new media infrastruc-ture (Lievrouw & Livingstone 2006). Together, the three aspects of infrastruc-ture are mutually implicated in the forms and quality of mediatedcommunication in society. They also set the terms for new media use – whogets to use communication technologies, for what purposes, under what con-ditions, and, crucially, who decides.

Taking the three features as a point of departure, the discussion moves on toan examination of several developments that have emerged in this relational,tightly bounded, and risk-averse new media context: the need for new reper-toires of communication competencies and logics, or network literacies; the pro-liferation of obsolete, incompatible, inaccessible, and unreadable technologyformats and systems, or dead media; and the growth of amateur- and peer-pro-duced commons knowledge. Developments such as these, and their articulations anddynamics, represent the kind of research problems and issues that may lie aheadfor new media studies over the next decade.

The last decade in Internet time: three features of thenew media landscape

Over the last 10 years, the Internet, mobile telephony, and related communi-cation technologies have undergone many important changes, both in terms ofthe platforms themselves and in terms of how people use and understand

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them. In many respects, it has been a period of ‘normalization’, domestication(Haddon 2006; Silverstone 2006), and even banalization (Lievrouw 2004) asnew media technologies have become more routine, taken for granted, and inte-grated into everyday life. Nonetheless, three main features corresponding to thepractices, tools, and social arrangements or formations of new media infrastruc-ture have emerged and interacted over time to produce a distinctive ‘climate’ orset of social conditions for contemporary mediated communication.

Practices: the relational Internet

Perhaps the most widely discussed change shaping perceptions of and discourseabout new media over the last decade has been the more personalized, relationalnature of mediated communication online, associated with a growing sense ofsociality and embeddedness within social and technical networks (what Rhein-gold (2010) has called ‘net awareness’). The term ‘Web 2.0’ has become short-hand for the clear dividing lines between today’s ‘social’ Internet and thepresumably more static, documentary, and less interactive ‘Web 1.0’ that pre-ceded it. However, the distinction is not that simple or merely a consequenceof the introduction of social network platforms such as MySpace, Friendster,Facebook, and Google+. Interpersonal interaction and small group/organiz-ational communication processes have been a major part of networked comput-ing from the earliest days of the ARPANET. Email was the Internet’s first,unqualified (and unexpected) ‘killer app’ (Newell & Sproull 1982). By thelate 1970s, complex computer-supported conferencing and group decision-support systems were already in place in many large organizations, and agrowing research literature was already examining interpersonal and smallgroup communication processes online (Short et al. 1976; Johansen et al.1979; Hiltz & Turoff 1993 [1978]). Usenet groups and ‘multi-user dungeons’for gamers flourished in the 1980s, before graphical user interfaces were gener-ally available. These systems and studies provided the foundation for today’sresearch field of computer-mediated communication.

Nonetheless, the pervasive use of social networks and related authoringsystems such as blogs and wikis has undoubtedly affected the ways that peoplethink about and use communication technologies in their daily lives. In particular,the newer systems have accelerated or reinforced the sense that relationships andinteractions are central to the experience of using and engaging with media. Sincethe early 2000s, countless studies have examined changing notions of friendship,intimacy, identity and self-representation, trust, personal disclosure, bullyingand abuse, and a host of other aspects of interpersonal communication in theonline context. Indeed, while ICTs and the Internet are now widely creditedin popular culture as sites for greater sociality and participation across traditionalsocial, geographic, and cultural boundaries, they are also blamed for an unpre-cedented range of personal risks and harms arising from online interaction.

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This sense of the greater opportunities and benefits of online interaction,paired with a growing sense of risk associated with new forms and venues forinterpersonal communication, underlies a different, and insightful, interpretationof the Internet ‘versions 1.0 and 2.0’ suggested by Graham Meikle in 2002.Although he proposed this characterization well before the age of Friendsterand Myspace, Meikle argued that – perhaps paradoxically – the openness, diver-sity of viewpoints, and ease of participation that were afforded even then by newmedia technologies, including new horizons for interpersonal interaction, werelikely to prompt a backlash, pressures to impose restrictions on user activities,and the restoration of a more stable, safe, culturally familiar, and market-oriented communication and media landscape. As he observed:

Version 2.0 is, for me, the lesser option . . . . Version 1.0 offers change;Version 2.0 offers more of the same. Version 1.0 demands openness, possi-bility, debate; Version 2.0 offers one-way information flows and a singleoption presented as ‘choice’ . . . . Version 1.0 would open things up.Version 2.0 would nail them down. (Meikle 2002, pp. 12–13)

The relational quality of online communication has had other importanteffects as well. Search and selectivity (of content, and among personal contactsand interactions) are now thoroughly integrated into mediated communicationand have transformed the production and circulation of traditional massmedia-style content. Search engines such as Google and Bing are the first stopfor users looking for any type of information online, from political debates torecipes to medical advice, and searchers routinely share results with othersthey know having similar interests or needs. At the same time, searchers runthe risk of encountering unexpected, unfamiliar, offensive, or harmful infor-mation that may be at odds with their existing perceptions, tastes, and beliefs.Ironically, perhaps, the new opportunities for communication and infor-mation-sharing have contributed to a parallel sense of risk, instability, anddanger among many users.

Tools: the enclosed Internet

There is little question that new media technologies have become more accessibleand adaptable across geographic space, diverse populations, and cultural settings,especially since the introduction of browser and search technologies in the early1990s and the build-out of mobile networks in the 2000s. In part, this has beendue to the distribution of relatively inexpensive and powerful mobile devices,applications, extensive digital networks, and investment in computationalcapacity and data storage on an unprecedented scale. At the same time, favorableeconomic policies and regulatory schemes have promoted investment in wirelesscommunication networks and services and a shift away from the older, more

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expensive, and more regulated installed base of wire-line telephones and broad-casting. At the same time, a strong do-it-yourself user culture of remixing andhacking has flourished, where off-the-shelf products, programs, and culturalworks are all commonly tinkered with, sampled, and reconfigured to suitlocal or specialized needs, interests, and tastes.

The consequences are now familiar. Established industries and markets havebeen disrupted and new generations of incumbent firms have emerged, especiallyin the areas of media content and entertainment. Sophisticated devices and ser-vices have been appropriated and domesticated (some might say have intruded)into everyday routines of home, family, leisure, work, and culture. Personalizedcommunication technologies and information resources are ever more integratedinto political processes and economic activity, leading to new forms of mobiliz-ation and collective action, but also to the perpetuation and reinforcement ofenduring social, economic, and political divides, inequities, and divisions. Eachadaptation seems to spark new rounds of admiration and optimism, on theone hand (e.g., the mobilization against authoritarian regimes in the MiddleEast, or the so-called Arab spring, and the uncanny sense of immediacy and cohe-sion among family and friends on Facebook), or moral panic, on the other hand(the so-called Blackberry riots in the UK and the creepy sense of personal over-exposure and lack of privacy on Facebook).

It might seem that the users of new media have never had so much choiceand flexibility in the range of available channels and resources. However, criticscharge that the choices are more illusory than real. Media, hardware and soft-ware firms, and their allies in government and law enforcement have respondedto DIY (do it yourself) and remix culture with a variety of tactics. Proprietaryapps, digital rights management, and anti-circumvention technologies not onlyprevent unsanctioned uses and access but actually conceal such choices fromusers (Cohen 2003). Incomprehensible licensing agreements1 and ‘pay walls’restrict information access and circulation in seemingly arbitrary and illogicalways. Particularly in the United States, ‘walled gardens’ of incompatible tech-nical standards and platforms, and interminable contracts with prohibitivepenalties for service termination, punish churn (users switching from oneservice to another) and lock in reliable revenue streams (Zittrain 2008). Delib-erate attempts to skirt intellectual property claims as well as the most innoc-uous personal, fair-use, or non-commercial uses of copyrighted material aremet with swift, severe (and, some charge, out-of-proportion) lawsuits, black-balling, and threats of criminal prosecution. Besieged authorities and law enfor-cement seek ‘kill switches’ to shut down Internet access for political activists orunauthorized file sharers (Morozov 2011). To instill respect for intellectualproperty values, primary school children are drilled on the dangers of‘piracy’ and reckless information ‘trafficking’ using curricula and lessons help-fully provided to school districts at no charge by entertainment industry groups(Gillespie 2009).

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To the extent that they have affected popular perceptions of appropriate orsafe uses of new media technologies, or have encouraged self-censorship, suchefforts have advanced private-sector and law enforcement aims of defining whatcounts as legitimate (paid, observable) versus illegitimate (unpaid, unobservable)communication. Yet hackability, adaptations, and workarounds persist in the faceof every effort to lock down, curtail, or prosecute. Critic Peter Lunenfeld (2011)describes the current cultural arena as a ‘secret war between downloading anduploading’, in which media industries (the forces of download) struggle to main-tain control over content and distribution in a technological and cultural terrainpopulated by users (the forces of upload) intent on stitching together newworks out of anything they can find and repurpose, and sharing them with thelarger online world, despite (or perhaps to spite) the technological and legalbarriers.

Social arrangements: the ‘mean world’ Internet

In the 1980s, communication scholars George Gerbner, Nancy Signorielli, andtheir colleagues developed cultivation theory, including a concept they calledthe ‘mean world syndrome’. They contended that people most heavilyexposed to mass media depictions of violence tend to believe that crime and vio-lence are much more prevalent in society than they actually are and tend to bemore fearful or mistrustful of others than real social conditions warrant (Gerbneret al. 1986; Signorielli 1990).

The third, and possibly most significant, influence on perceptions and uses ofthe Internet and new media over the last decade resembles the mean world syn-drome, scaled up. Communication and information networks, and particularlythe Internet, have been reframed as sites of struggle and danger in geopolitical,economic, and military conflicts. The attacks of September 11, 2001; the sub-sequent United States-led ‘war on terror’ and insurgencies and assaults againstWestern states and interests; the rise of grass-roots democracy/independencemovements and political oppositions in many developing regions of the world;and fears about criminal networks coordinating and conducting their activitiesonline have dominated media coverage of new media and transfixed thepopular imagination. These events are now routinely invoked by authorities tojustify the expansion of private and state surveillance/security apparatuseswith global scale and personal, pinpoint reach. In commerce and politics, thecapture, collection, and assessment of information about individuals and theiractivities have become the raison d’etre for social network sites, search engines,online publishing and media, and workplace/employee monitoring systems.Data gathering and data classification have become an integral (some say indis-pensable) part of warfare, policing, education, health care, finance, travel, andvirtually every other aspect of contemporary life.

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New institutional forms, legal regimes, and political discourses to supportand justify these apparatuses have arisen, based on the assumption that the Inter-net is a pivotal site of conflict, vulnerability, deception, and risk to individuals andthe established order. Extremist or oppositional websites of all stripes are mon-itored, sabotaged, or shut down outright, depending on local legal codes. Forexample, provisions of the first and second US Patriot Acts allowed governmentauthorities unprecedented access to individuals’ electronic communicationswithout search warrants, including telephone calls, email traffic, financialrecords, and even library patrons’ borrowing records (with the added provisothat the organizations surrendering the information were prohibited from noti-fying their clients either that they had been approached by law enforcement orthat the information was surrendered). On an even larger scale, after the Sep-tember 11 events, a congeries of US federal law enforcement, security, andrelief agencies, missions, and jurisdictions were quickly reorganized into thesingle, outsize, omnibus US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Orig-inally justified by the George W. Bush administration by the need to streamlinethe aggregation and sharing of different agencies’ vast stores of intelligence oncitizens and foreign visitors, the agency’s current scope – and the positioningof the Internet as a central point of vulnerability to national security – issuggested by a recent White House statement on the 2012 budget request forthe DHS. The agency is described as ‘the principal Federal agency chargedwith the vital missions of preventing terrorism and enhancing security, securingand managing America’s borders, enforcing and administering immigration laws,safeguarding and securing cyberspace, and ensuring resilience to disasters’(http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/factsheet_department_homeland/).

The institutional and legal changes are not restricted to the United States,however. A recent European Union directive on ‘cyber crime’ strengthens andexpands the authority of the European Network and Information SecurityAgency, metes out stiffer criminal sanctions for ‘perpetrators of cyber attacksand the producers of related and malicious software’, and requires thatmember states establish their own dedicated cyber-crime agencies and respondwithin hours to requests from other members for investigation of allegedviolations originating within their borders (http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/10/1239). Many of the directive’s pro-visions have been characterized as unclear or debatable: for example, by prohi-biting the interception of any data deemed confidential, it would outlaw theactivities of whistleblowers as well as organizations such as Wikileaks. The direc-tive also makes participation in denial-of-service actions of any sort illegal, but inso doing could make unwitting owners of computers captured by botnets liableto prosecution. Despite these questions, and some objections by conservatives inthe coalition government, the UK’s Home Office signed on to the directive inFebruary 2011 (http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/home-office-adopts-

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flawed-eu-cyber-crime-directive-20045; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12354931).

Authoritarian regimes are often criticized by more democratic states forrestricting information-seeking, personal expression or interaction online thatmight criticize their ruling parties, policies, or leadership. Activists andopponents of repressive governments are widely praised by Americans and Eur-opeans for their clever uses of social networks and messaging and microbloggingservices to work around state surveillance and mobilize protests. However,British politicians recently found themselves on the receiving end of similar,and none-too-subtle, criticism by Iran, China, Zimbabwe, Libya, and otherauthoritarian states that deplored the ‘sickness’ and permissiveness of Britishsociety and the hypocrisy of calls by British politicians and the general publicfor severe ‘crackdowns’ on uses of mobile technologies and the Internet bytheir own citizens involved in the riots there (http://www.21cb.net/london-riots-china-response/; http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/08/iran-libya-and-china-uk-riots-are-time-taunt/41062/).

In response to the urban unrest, British leaders suggested severe measures,including banning rioters from access to communications services, shutting downsocial network sites in times of crisis, and even evicting families of participants inthe disturbances from public housing and eliminating their benefits. However, insubsequent talks with industry representatives from Research in Motion (makersof the Blackberry Messenger service), Facebook, and Twitter, the firms assuredthe government that they would cooperate with law enforcement efforts touse their systems to track and identify offenders. The tech news websiteZDnet quoted Facebook’s statement that ‘this was a dialogue about workingtogether to keep people safe rather than about imposing new restrictions onInternet services’ and RIM’s declaration that ‘It was a positive and productivemeeting and we were pleased to consult on the use of social media to engageand communicate during times of emergency’ (http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/from-both-sides-10005031/government-climbs-down-on-social-network-blocking-10024206/?s_cid=452). Subsequently, the coalition governmentbacked away from its proposals to implement ‘kill switches’, allowing themto shut down social network services, although as a writer for the news siteTechEye.net ironically observed, ‘shutting down social networks is a bit likeprosecuting the postman’ (http://news.techeye.net/Internet/home-office-concludes-banning-facebook-was-barmy).

Practices, tools, and arrangements: articulations

Considered together, the three developments outlined above – the personal-yet-exposed quality of online communication, ‘walled’ or enclosed technologies andstandards, and the proliferation of institutions and policies designed to monitor,

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control, and stabilize an inherently risky and dangerous online world – point to afuture for mediated communication that is more reliable, stable, predictable, andsafe, but potentially less innovative, creative, and open. Each development cor-responds to a different aspect of new media infrastructure: tools, practices, andsocial arrangements, respectively. It is useful to examine the articulations amongthe three aspects and to consider how they have shaped and even reinforced oneanother.

In terms of tools, the enclosed Internet has evolved, in part, in response toboth users’ demands and institutional shifts toward greater oversight and controlof online activities. Users want applications and devices that are easy to use,reliable (less prone to breakdown), secure (resistant to unwanted intrusion orhijacking), and safe (able to block or flag people, resources, and activities thatusers find undesirable, offensive, or threatening). Institutional authoritiesdemand that systems comply with – or even automatically enforce – an expand-ing range of legal and commercial demands, including privacy laws, intellectualproperty claims, national security and law enforcement directives, competitiverivalries among firms and trade blocs, and cultural and ethical norms.

By the same token, the devices and systems that are available in given timeand place also shape users’ expectations about what the tools can do and whatthey are for, as well as what people actually do with them. The relational Inter-net, as pointed out previously, has become a venue for interpersonal interactionand personal expression, not only straightforward information-seeking or theconsumption and appropriation of media products. Facebook members mayhave qualms about how the site gathers, aggregates, and shares data aboutthem, but many readily offer real-time information about their whereabouts,contacts, interests, and social preferences to Facebook and location-based ser-vices such as foursquare or Twitter. They may use loyalty programs andmobile phone apps that collect information about their shopping habits andproduct consumption in exchange for discounted merchandise, or surrender per-sonal information ranging from financial and travel records to religious beliefsand biometric scans to security firms or law enforcement agencies that assureconcerned users that the collection of such detailed individual information is anecessary and appropriate means to prevent and prosecute terrorism, crimi-nality, fraud, and so on.

In terms of social arrangements, organizations and institutions also respondand adapt to the available tools and devices and to people’s communication prac-tices and norms. Platforms and products designed to be incompatible with thoseof competitors and digital rights management technologies that restrict users’access to and uses of media content have helped firms such as Microsoft,Apple, and Amazon dominate their respective industries and markets. Thepurview, size, responsibilities, and political power of state security and lawenforcement agencies have vastly expanded in parallel with the availability ofsophisticated systems for surveillance, data capture, storage, and analysis, as

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well as sharply increased citizen demands for public safety and protection fromrisk.

In summary, the articulations among tools, practices, and social arrange-ments are dynamic: each builds on and reinforces the others, and a shift inone aspect can provoke corresponding shifts across the other two. This mayor may not be a welcome prospect. From the progressive-left or libertarian per-spective, for example, preoccupations with risk, safety, control, reliability, andsecurity – and consequent moves towards ever more monitored, standardized,filtered, regulated, and exclusionary systems, actions, and patterns of organiz-ation – may look like a vicious circle or downward feedback loop. Technologies,people, and institutions are being driven toward a dystopian scenario where allforms of expressions and relationships are open to inspection by commercialinterests, the state, or even other individuals, on demand, anytime, anywhere.The situation might also be likened to a kind of digital, global-scale ‘spiral ofsilence’, Noelle-Neumann’s (1984) theory of public opinion formation andmass communication, which hypothesizes that interpersonal communicationand mass media echo and reinforce popular opinions, while marginalizing, sanc-tioning, and silencing unpopular or disruptive ideas. The spiral of silence thusreinforces political stability and the status quo.

However, it is not necessarily the case that the articulation between tools,practices, and social arrangements is always a matter of feed forward or pathdependence with largely determined outcomes. The articulations among thethree elements of infrastructure also create opportunities for pushback, gaps,or spaces of action towards alternative outcomes. The three developments dis-cussed in the next section – again, they correspond to the practices, tools,and social arrangements of new media infrastructure – suggest not only that con-temporary communication technologies remain open to new or unexpected usesand forms, but also that new media scholars should develop equally innovativeapproaches and perspectives to understand events as they unfold in the nextdecade in Internet time.

New developments, new ways ahead

If new media and mediated communication have become more relational,enclosed, and risk averse, what problem areas or issues may lie ahead for newmedia research and scholarship? Three are suggested here. Network literaciesand pedagogies are prerequisites for effective social, economic, and political par-ticipation. Dead media pose an ever greater challenge to the sustainability of cul-tural heritage as well as to regimes of total surveillance and capture of personalinformation. Commons knowledge becomes a larger and more influential part ofculture, challenging expertise, knowledge authorities, and traditional insti-tutional power.

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Practices: network literacies

It is one thing to say that communication online has become more relational,socialized, and expressive. In practical terms, however, this requires that individ-uals master an emergent, articulated repertoire of communicative competenciesthat mixes interpersonal and group process fluency; an aptitude for organizing,pattern recognition, and making linkages and correspondences; and an orien-tation toward tinkering, design, and the crafting of messages that is more typi-cally associated with traditional media production, engineering/programming,and the arts. As an ensemble, we might think of this repertoire of competenciesas network literacy, where communication networks are conceived as inextric-ably social and technological. Those who are network literate are as comfortablewith divergent cultural ideas and expressions as they are with the channels andmethods for generating and sharing them.

As with other forms of literacies, proficiency in the network context doesnot necessarily, or entirely, ‘come naturally’ – it must be taught and learned.Thus, some of the most compelling questions for the next decade in Internettime may ask what pedagogies must be implemented for teaching and learningnetwork literacy and how to do so.

The idea of network literacy (or literacies, more accurately) and related con-cepts has attracted intense interest recently among researchers and educators.For example, Jenkins et al. (2009) at the University of Southern California’sNew Media Literacies Project, supported by the MacArthur Foundation’s DigitalMedia and Learning initiative, argued that ‘new media literacies’ comprisedigital literacies plus media literacies. They suggested that new media literaciesare stymied less by simple access to technologies than by a participation gap (lackof access to learning opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge), a trans-parency problem (ability to recognize how media shape people’s perceptions ofthe world), and an ethics challenge (the breakdown of traditional professionaltraining and norms). They included 11 core skills as new media literacies:play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cogni-tion, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, andnegotiation.

Similarly, the Learning Through Digital Media project at the New School inNew York City has collected essays, demonstrations, teaching tools, and contentmaterials and made them available in both print and online forms. In his introductionto the project, editor and project leader Trebor Scholz noted that ‘The most burningproblem for digital learning is technological obsolescence and the attendant need tolearn and readapt to new technological milieus and cycles of transformation’, butsuggested that technological facility is dependent on an even more important setof learned attitudes: ‘Openness, flexibility, playfulness, persistence, and theability to work well with others on-the-fly are at the heart of an attitude thatallows learners to cope with the unrelenting velocity of technological change in

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the twenty-first century’ (http://www.learningthroughdigitalmedia.net/introduction-learning-through-digital-media#more-362/). Although these aretwo of the more widely known efforts currently, similar ideas underlie a numberof related concepts, and not just for young learners. For example, social intelligencehas been proposed as the ability to seek and evaluate information in complex socialand technological webs (Cronin & Davenport 1993). Long-time Internet observerand pundit Rheingold (2010) has advocated a scheme for network literacy thatencompasses five foundational competencies: attention, participation, cooperation,critical consumption (what he calls ‘crap detection’), and net awareness (see alsohttp://howardrheingold.posterous.com/).

It might be argued – and Rheingold, Jenkins, and others would surely agree– that virtually all the skills or attitudes they espouse are essential components ofcritical thinking that should be cultivated regardless of technological or culturalsetting. However, a couple of factors set network literacy apart. The first is thecrucial and growing need for people to be able to evaluate information sourcesand content, implied by Jenkins’s emphasis on judgment and Rheingold’s ‘crapdetection’. Such skills are especially important as traditional modes of knowledgegeneration, organization and gatekeeping are being challenged or eroded bymore participatory and inclusive peer-production practices online, which canalso be prone to revisionism, spin, incivility and bias, deliberate misinformation,and so on (see the following section on commons knowledge). Going one stepfurther, judgment and evaluation in the network context may not simply be amatter of comparing new or untested information against established standardsor truth claims. The ways that information is generated and organized are fun-damentally ontological, and network-literate individuals should be ready to ques-tion that ontology as well as their own epistemic values about how useful or validinformation and knowledge are gained and understood.

The second distinctive aspect of network literacy is suggested by Jenkinset al.’s ‘transparency problem’ and Rheingold’s notion of net awareness. Bothconcepts imply that the network-literate person must understand how he orshe is situated vis-a-vis others and the larger social and technological worldbeyond the relations and circumstances at hand. For Rheingold (2010), netawareness includes not just a sense of the architecture of communication tech-nology and how it enables some kinds of action and information flows and con-strains others; it also requires a sense of interpersonal and group relatedness,linkages, and power, online and off. And unlike many other observers callingfor a new network perspective in teaching and learning, Rheingold insist thatthe core principles and techniques of social network analysis – power lawsand the long tail phenomenon, network externalities, centrality/prominence,cliques and subgroup structures, weak ties, structural equivalence, and so on– must be the core of teaching and learning about networks. Similarly, Lievrouwand Nguyen (2007) have proposed a related conceptual framework, the networkimaginary, defined as the ability to imagine and visualize networks of social and

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technical relations and links, including the extension, possible breakdown, andconsequences of these relations. People can anticipate the effects of theiractions on these relations and consequences, within their immediate surround-ings and beyond, in other systems, events, people, and places in the largerworld. The network imaginary shapes people’s perceptions of the range ofaction open to them, in material/physical and virtual/mediated places alike.Cultivating this sense of situatedness and options for action, as well as theskills for mapping and analyzing networks, might be expected to be a fundamen-tal part of any network or new media pedagogy.

Certainly, a few other competencies might be needed to round out any com-prehensive account of network literacy. For example, navigation and search(interpersonal, informational, and political) have not usually been counted asmajor aspects of communicative competence; however, few would argue thatthese are minor or secondary skills given today’s technology and culture. Visu-alization – the ability to conceptualize and render/depict complex or abstractconcepts in creative ways in a variety of formats and media – is especially valu-able as communication technologies become less and less tied to text (Vesna’s(2007) concept of Database Aesthetics, for example, is a particularly powerfulway to think about ‘making the invisible visible’). Other core competenciesmight include hacking, remixing, and repurposing, reverse engineering, andinvention, for example. But over the next decade, it will be necessary tomove beyond enduring assumptions and didactic habits in order to see communi-cation itself as a manifestation of continuously reorganizing networks of action,relations, dependencies, and roles and to ‘teach for remediation and reconfigura-tion’ (Lievrouw 2009).

Tools: dead media

As the preceding discussion suggests, much of the interest in new media technol-ogies over the last decade has stemmed from their seemingly limitless capacityfor information capture, storage, and analysis. It has become commonplace toassume that everything – all aspects of life and culture, online and offline –can and will be recorded and kept using cheap, high-precision digital recordingtechnologies and storage media, in what has been called ‘perfect remembering’(Mayer-Schonberger 2009). In both popular culture and research accounts,stories abound about thoughtless email messages, compromising photos, orintemperate videos that, once posted online, can never be completely trackeddown and deleted.2 Unwanted files seem to become deathless, lurking indefi-nitely in remote corners of cyberspace, ready to be disinterred and circulatedinappropriately when the author least expects or needs it, with dire conse-quences for his or her reputation, professional status, or personal life. Criticscontend that the personal and social risks of such total capture and recallrequire new technologies and policies to facilitate the deliberate, selective,

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and complete expunging of sensitive, false, misleading, or personally risky infor-mation from the world’s databases.

There is little question that individuals should be able to exercise much morecontrol over their personal information online than is generally permitted today.There are obvious risks associated with the pervasive capture of personal infor-mation, and technological and legal safeguards against such ubiquitous data-gath-ering and third-party profiling are desirable and should be pursued. In the UnitedStates, for example, organizations that collect information about customers,clients, patrons, or patients insist that such data become their property andthat the individuals whose data have been collected have no right to retrieve,modify, or delete them. Privacy policies on Facebook have evolved over timeas a result of similar tensions: the efforts of the site’s owners to appropriateusers’ postings and network links as proprietary information to be sold to adver-tisers have been met with repeated waves of resistance from regulators and userswho insist that they should have greater control over who has access to theirinformation and how it can be used. Viviane Reding, the European justice com-missioner, has recently advocated revisions to the EU Data Protection Directivethat would increase individuals’ control over personal information online, includ-ing a ‘right to be forgotten’ (O’Brien 2011).

However, the idea of total, loss-free digital capture of all knowledge andinformation, or ‘perfect remembering’, should be viewed skeptically. In thefirst place, the total capture and recall of a society’s (or even an individual’s)works and activities has never, and is unlikely ever to be, possible. All culturesforget; digital culture is no exception. Historically, the overwhelming majority ofhuman knowledge has been lost, destroyed, sabotaged, pulled out of context,excluded from the record, suppressed, or never recorded at all. Conclusionsare inevitably drawn on the basis of incomplete, contradictory, and divergentinformation. There is little about culture today to suggest that these processeshave changed in any fundamental way as a consequence of digital communicationtechnologies.

The fact of cultural forgetting, combined with rapidly accelerating cycles oftechnological obsolescence and turnover, is the basis of what might be called deadmedia – possibly the greatest barrier to the dream (or nightmare) of perfectremembering. The basic tools of the Internet (digital recording and transmissiontechnologies, formats, and storage systems) are notably short lived and incom-patible across platforms and standards, especially in comparison to physical andanalog formats. Digital files and databases are notoriously fugitive and difficult topreserve in usable form for any extended period of time; they are among themost profoundly fragmented, disorganized, incompatible, and ephemeralforms of record-keeping ever devised. Formats, devices, and architecturesbecome obsolete and are abandoned in favor of the next new design with littleor no consideration for retaining the records or functions of the old systems.(As Rand researcher and preservationist Rothenberg [1999 (1995), p. 2] has

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observed, ‘old bit streams never die – they just become unreadable’.) Robust,universal methods for the permanent preservation of digital records do not yetexist. While several interim strategies for maintaining digital records have beenproposed, digital preservation is a largely unsolved technical problem, with nogood prospects on the horizon.

We might consider the implications of dead media for cultural legacy, auth-enticity, and memory. What, if anything, constitutes a ‘perfect’, original, orreliable record – is it even possible? What does it signify or provide evidenceof? Why are records kept in the first place? Whose stories are recorded ordestroyed (or not), and who decides? Even if total capture of the culturalrecord were technically possible, would it be desirable?

These questions, and the enduring cultural fact of incomplete and forgotteninformation, are usually framed in terms of loss and error. Paradoxically, wemight agree with Mayer-Schonberger’s basic insight: the social and ethical benefitsof forgetting tend to be neglected in cultures that place the greatest faith in theability of digital technologies to capture and keep an absolutely faithful and com-plete record of the past. However, the real dangers may lie less in ostensibly‘lossless’ webs of personal dossiers than in the histories written and judgmentsmade on the basis of disconnected scraps of data that rarely survive more thana few years.

Social arrangements: commons knowledge

The collective creation and maintenance of vast collections of information bycommunities of people with shared interests – what Benkler (2007) hastermed ‘commons-based peer production’ – have become important featuresof online communication, from participatory journalism (Deuze et al. 2007),to popular culture (Shirky 2008), to political activism and whistleblowing(e.g., Wikileaks; Sifry 2011), to academic scholarship and science (Lievrouw2010). These have opened unprecedented opportunities for powerful newmodes of knowledge production and collaboration, but have also drawncharges of amateurism, incompetence, deliberate falsification, misattributionand misappropriation, and more. The third development with important impli-cations for the direction of new media studies is a consequence of this increas-ingly collaborative, collective, inclusive, and relatively gatekeeper-free arenafor communication online. Commons knowledge projects do not mobilizeonly the efforts of hundreds or even thousands of people, who make small, gran-ular contributions to very large enterprises that might otherwise be too complexor expensive to undertake; in addition, the resources that are created oftenchallenge or compete with more established, authoritative, expert-driven andinstitutionally supported modes of generating, compiling, and circulatingknowledge.

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Commons knowledge projects have several important characteristics that dis-tinguish them as forms of collaboration and knowledge-sharing. The first is theirAlexandrian ambitions, in the sense of the lost library of Alexandria, which wasbuilt to hold all the knowledge of the ancient world. As the word suggests, thisideal did not originate with digital technologies; similar visions of universal,total knowledge collection and organization have motivated thinkers and scholarssince Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedie in the eighteenth century. BeforeWorld War I, for example, Paul Otlet developed the Universal Decimal Classifi-cation and founded the Palais Mondial (later, the Mundaneum) in Belgium, wherehe and other ‘documentalists’ envisioned that all the world’s documents – includ-ing models, images, artworks, plans and diagrams, and biological specimens, andso on, as well as texts – might be collected and organized according to a universalbibliographic catalog that would guide users through networks of links amongrelated resources (see Rayward 2003, 2008a; Wright 2008).

In the 1930s, H.G. Wells (1938) called for the creation of a single, enor-mous shared encyclopedia, or ‘world brain’, to overcome the provincialismand disciplinary blinkers of traditional academic scholarship and learning. Vanne-var Bush, an administrator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whobecame Director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Developmentduring World War II, believed that scientific and technical progress was beingstymied by the growing tide of unrelated and unsynthesized research publi-cations. In an essay in The Atlantic in 1945 entitled ‘As We May Think’, now atouchstone for historians and cultural studies of the Web, Bush proposed adevice called memex that would allow users to find connections across diversebodies of scientific knowledge and retrieve documents directly to a microfilm-based workstation (Bush 1945).

From this longer perspective, Berners-Lee’s (1989) proposal for the hyper-text transfer protocol (http), which is widely credited as the cornerstone of theWorld Wide Web, certainly brings forward many of the same concerns aboutundigested, unconnected pieces of information articulated by Vannevar Bush,as well as the necessity of creating systems that effectively make ‘all the knowl-edge in the world’ (in Otlet’s phrase) accessible and navigable. Hugely successfulprojects such as Wikipedia continue the tradition of ‘modern encyclopedists’such as Wells (Rayward 2008b).

What distinguishes a Wikipedia from a Mundaneum, however, and thesecond characteristic of commons knowledge is how information is collectedand organized. Where Otlet, Wells, Bush, and others assumed that universalstandards for cataloging and classifying huge, comprehensive collections ofauthoritative knowledge would be necessary to make that knowledge moreaccessible to anyone who might use it, commons knowledge projects are justas likely to let contributor-editors decide among themselves what topics andresources are significant and how they should be organized. Tagging, bookmark-ing, commenting/annotation systems, recommendation engines, and similar

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tools have enabled the generation of dynamic, bottom-up, folksonomic modes ofknowledge organization that shift and evolve along with users’ interests, inter-actions, searches, and retrievals.

The neologism ‘folksonomy’ is a play on ‘taxonomy’, defined as a formalclassification system for organizing items into specific, mutually exclusive cat-egories or taxa. Taxonomies are generated by experts using thesauri of special-ized terms to label and organize items in a collection; these standardized labelsand categories are called metadata. Otlet’s Universal Decimal Classificationsystem and the Dewey Decimal Classification system on which it was basedare classic examples of expert-driven taxonomies. Projects such as Wikipedia,however, as well as other user-generated resources such as Flickr and Twitter,are organized according to the users’ own shifting perceptions of the informationthey contribute, collect, and comment on. There is no standardized ‘controlledvocabulary’ that users must consult to decide how to tag or categorize thematerials they post or how to link materials to other works. The main advantageof the folksonomic approach is an acute sensitivity to changing ideas and the cul-tural contexts of users, so that information resources can be highly personalized,adaptable, and open to creative, counter-intuitive, or novel approaches to pro-blems. Folksonomic systems allow users to frame questions and interests intheir own language, in ways that may be more faithful to the social and culturalworlds they inhabit. The disadvantages, however, include a tendency to idiosyn-crasy: by using their own natural language (as they might do in a Google search,for example) rather than the authoritative specialist terms for certain topics,users may not find important materials that might be relevant to their interests– indeed, they may not even be aware of them. The growing reliance on systemsthat tailor or customize what users are able to seek and find online, principally asa means to gather and exploit highly targeted marketing information about indi-viduals’ tastes and interests, has recently become a focal point for debate amongcritics who fear that such ‘filter bubbles’ are segregating people into ever nar-rower knowledge enclaves with little opportunity to interact across boundariesof culture, demographics, or interest (Pariser 2011).

The third defining characteristic of commons knowledge can be seen as whathappens when the Alexandrian impulse intersects with folksonomic modes ofknowledge generation and organization: a distrust of knowledge authorities and insti-tutions, in favor of more ‘grass-roots’ or egalitarian participation by experts andamateurs alike. This anti-authoritarian tendency has strong parallels in the early,libertarian ‘hacker culture’ whose members designed some of the key features ofnetworked computing and telecommunications, in particular, their deliberatelyopen architectures that allowed users to tinker with and modify them accordingto their particular needs or desires (Nissenbaum 2004; Turner 2006). Similarpractices and attitudes have transferred readily into projects involving the gener-ation and circulation of online content (Lunenfeld 2011); a striking recentexample is provided by Wikileaks and similar sites, which provide secure

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‘drop boxes’ where anonymous contributors can submit materials that exposeinstitutional hypocrisy or malfeasance. Some critics have accused Wikipediansand other ‘crowdsourcing’ advocates of anti-intellectualism and alienating thevery experts who might enrich their projects (e.g., Duguid 2006). Othersallege that amateur and volunteer participation is fundamentally exploitative,capturing the efforts of highly talented contributors for free or a fraction ofwhat their labor is worth (Terranova 2000; Lovink & Rossiter 2007).

Other observers, however, see the move towards more participatory formsof knowledge production and circulation as a positive development (Surowiecki2004; Benkler 2007; Shirky 2008). The perspectives and passionate commitmentof amateur enthusiasts, advocates say, bring new vitality to traditional fields thathave erected high professional barriers to entry and thus have becomeentrenched, stale, and more concerned with reinforcing status distinctions andreward systems than with new ideas and debates. In fact, many established dis-ciplines have a long history of amateur scholarship and scientific discovery(Dyson 2002; Lievrouw 2010). There is little evidence, advocates say, thatexperts are being deliberately excluded or discouraged from participation(Sanger 2009); what participants object to is not expertise per se, but ‘credenti-alism’ and deference to institutions, professional titles and privileges, or qualifi-cations in themselves (Fallis 2008; Tapscott & Williams 2008).

The next decade in Internet time

In this paper, I have suggested that both the recent history of new media and thefuture research agenda for new media studies can be framed in terms of threearticulated, and mutually shaping, aspects of new media infrastructure: the prac-tices in which people engage to interact and share information and meaning; thetools, devices, and artifacts that people create and use in order to do so; and thesocial arrangements or institutional forms that develop out of and around thesepractices and tools. Over the last decade, new media practices have becomemore relational; tools and systems have become increasingly enclosed andwalled; and institutions and authorities have redefined online communicationas a ‘mean world’ that requires new regimes of stabilization and control. Together,these features have created a climate that is widely regarded as the new normalfor new media in the early twenty-first century.

Given this climate, I have also proposed three possible problem areas ordirections for new media research in the near future, again aligning with thepractices, tools, and social arrangements of infrastructure. Network literaciesand pedagogies that will allow individuals to be full and effective participantsin society, economy, culture, and politics must be developed and implemented.The proliferation of dead media may provoke even greater efforts to developsystems for total surveillance and information capture, on the one hand, or

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offer a welcome haven from pervasive observation and recording, enabling a‘right to be forgotten’, on the other hand. Commons knowledge projects maychallenge and even reconfigure the foundations of institutional authority, exper-tise, and legitimacy.

However, whether these particular problems and questions, or others,emerge as important streams of new media studies in the future or not, itseems certain that the linkages among practices, tools, and social arrangementswill continue to be in flux and subject to persistent tensions and interplay. Howpeople communicate, with whom, what devices they use, and how they organizetheir communicative relationships and systems will continue to be elements in adynamic, interdependent, and emergent process. The task for new media studiesin the next decade in Internet time will be to bring these elements together incoherent, innovative accounts of the ways that communication technology andsociety constitute one another.

Notes

1 Fine parodies of licensing agreements include those by the collectiveIllegal Art (http://www.illegal-art.org/contract.html), If BookPublishers Used License Agreements by Washington, DC publisher BillAdler (http://www.adlerbooks.com/booklicense.html), and ‘Japa-nese soldier found hiding in software license agreement’ on the satiri-cal website NewsBiscuit (http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2007/06/19/japanese-soldier-discovered-in-software-license-agreement/).

2 See, for example, Mayer-Schonberger discussing his book Delete: TheVirtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (2009) at Harvard University’sBerkman Center for Internet & Society, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwxVA0UMwLY.

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Wright, A. (2008) ‘The web time forgot’, New York Times, 17 June, [Online] Avail-able at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html (15November 2011).

Zittrain, J. (2008) The Future of the Internet – and How to Stop It, Yale UniversityPress, New Haven, CT, London.

Leah A. Lievrouw is a Professor in the Department of Information Studies at

the University of California, Los Angeles. Her most recent book Alternative and

Activist New Media (Polity, 2011) explores the ways that artists and activists use

new media technologies to challenge mainstream culture, politics, and society.

Along with Sonia Livingstone of the London School of Economics, she is also

the co-editor of the four-volume Sage Benchmarks in Communication: New

Media (Sage, 2009) and of The Handbook of New Media (updated student

edition; Sage, 2006). Works in progress include Media and Meaning: Communi-

cation Technology and Society (Oxford University Press) and Foundations of

Media and Communication Theory (Blackwell). Prof. Lievrouw received a PhD in

communication theory and research in 1986 from the Annenberg School for Com-

munication at the University of Southern California. She also holds an MA in bio-

medical communications/instructional development from the University of Texas

Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and a Bachelor of Journalism from the

University of Texas at Austin. Previously, she has held faculty appointments in

T H E N E X T D E C A D E I N I N T E R N E T T I M E 6 3 7

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the Department of Communication in the School of Communication, Information,

and Library Studies (SCILS) at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, and in

the Department of Telecommunication and Film at the University of Alabama.

She has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Amsterdam’s School

of Communication Research (ASCoR) in the Netherlands and visiting professor

at the ICT & Society Center at the University of Salzburg, Austria. Address:

Department of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, 216

GSE&IS Building, Box 951520, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1520, USA. [email:

[email protected]]

6 3 8 I N F O R M A T I O N , C O M M U N I C A T I O N & S O C I E T Y

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