The age of permanent net revolution - John Naughton

1993 - the world wide web takes off

Naughton mentions the term "endism" - referring to the process of new technologies coming in and replacing older ones. For example, when the the CD-rom arrived, people believed this would be the end of the printed book etc.

• Cultural critic Neil Postman proposed a media ecology borrowing the idea of a biological ecosystem.
• The "organisms" in our ecosystem include broadcast and narrowcast television, movies, radio, print and the internet. Whilst broadcast TV was the most dominant for a long time, it has now undergone an extreme change with its audience fragmenting.
• narrowcast digital television is incoming with specialist content which is aimed at subscription based audiences. Internet Protocol TV, television on demand is now being created, and delivered via the net.

Broadcast TV's problem was that the dynamics of it were based on attracting mass audiences. It will, however, continue to exist because some things are best covered using "a few-to-many technology".

The web and the net are very different things. The web is just one kind of "traffic" in the net. It is already being overtaken by other forms of "traffic".

"peer-to-peer networking traffic now exceeds web traffic by a factor of between two and 10, depending on the time of day".

The signs of net's centrality are everywhere which include:

1. the spread of broadband
2. online retailing
3. streaming media
4. Google
5. internet telephony

The internet is clearly becoming essential in our lives and our children will live in an environment dominated by technology and the internet.

Broadcast TV is what is known as a "push" medium, which consists of pushing it down analogue or digital channels at audiences which are assumed to essentially consist of passive recipients.

The web on the other hand, is a "pull" medium. Basically "you're in charge!" - the switch from push to pull is an extreme increase in consumer sovereignty, the power is becoming unlimited.

The emergency of a truly sovereign, informed consumer is thus one of the implications of an internet-centric world.

Broadband TV used to assume that it's audience were to some extent "uncreative" and "passive", but it is now being discovered that this may of been because of the absence of tools, and publication oppurtunities.

In terms of blogging, many of the postings are vanity publishing with no "discernable literary or intellectual merit"

The oppurtunity has now been grabbed and the blogging phenomenon is no longer a one way street - digital photography is an example of the remarkable "creativity" we are expressing nowadays.