ernment
involvement in the early stages of technological innovation can provide significant favours to
the private sector at the expense of the public good. For example, he tells the story of the
U.S. government’s giveaway of digital spectrum worth $70 billion to the broadcasting sector,
a decision resulting from the U.S.’s 1996 Telecommunications Act. With the assistance of a
few lines of legal language, the future of digital TV was made fundamentally commercial in
nature.
Yet, once these policy decisions are in place, and things consequently develop in the media
marketplace, they are then retroactively interpreted as naturally expressing the will of market
forces. In other words, the contribution of policy makers to the invention or early direction of
major technologies is often obscured once the discourse of technological determinism, so
compatible with a market society that disparages public investment in principle, is allowed to
dictate our understanding of what these technologies mean. McChesney demonstrates two ways in which such patterns can lead to significantly entrenched structures thereafter. First,
the phenomenon of “bandwagon effects” means that once a particular technical standard
is decided—a classic example being the dominance of VHS over Beta as a videotape
standard—the commercial benefits of those who hold the patent for the chosen
technological standard are enormous. Moreover, once a technology is dominant, it
establi英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】shes a “path dependency” that makes it difficult to challenge. For example,
Windows is arguably not the best PC operating system ever devised, yet its market
dominance has made it the default OS of choice for most computer manufacturers and
consumers.
The Internet’s emergence has given rise to the idea that we no longer have to worry about
the concentration of media ownership: that digital media, to offer a variation on Chairman
Mao’s famous dictum, allows a thousand I-Pods to bloom. While digital media do squeeze
more channel capacity out of electromagnetic waves and fiber-optic cable, the
commercialization of cyberspace—assisted by copyright, advertising, and the firesale
giveaway of spectrum rights—is transforming the Internet from an open to a closed network.
In a statement that sympathizes with the ideas of technology critic Langdon Winner,
McChesney writes (220):
In sum, the course of the Internet has everything to do with a range of crucial policy
issues, most of which are unknown to the general public, unreported in the news
media, and undebated in the mainstream political culture. What is clear is that if
people assume the technologies come prewired with how they are to be deployed, it
is more likely that the public will remain blissfully unaware of the crucial policy
deliberations taking place.
While the Internet does allow people with modest resources to mount pages and attract
audiences, it remains that quality
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