Abstract
Misunderstanding the Internet offers a critical perspective on the state of digital communication networks and on the existing literature on the subject. The overarching argument is clearly stated in its title. The power of the internet, and the assessment of the changes it has produced have been misunderstood, and the authors’ goal is to set the record straight by pointing out the shortcomings of previous analyses, and by offering a more balanced account of the current state of the internet.
The book is divided into three main sections, each by one of the coauthors: Overview, by Curran; Political Economy of the Internet, by Freedman; and Internet and Power, by Fenton. Curran starts by confronting “internet-centrism” (p.3) and examining the actual impact of the internet on four areas: economics, global understanding, democracy and journalism. Despite the fact that the author’s insistence on proving that the internet has been misunderstood leads him to provide a sketchy version of opposing views and weighs too much in his assessment of the actual impact of the internet, the issues are well chosen, and Curran identifies a set of key points that require consideration. His view is that the economic impact of the internet is limited, that the idea that the internet promotes global understanding “overlooks a number of things” (p.11), that the internet “has energized activism” but “has not revitalized democracy” (p.17), and that the internet has not brought a renaissance of journalism, but probably quite the opposite. The second chapter in this section delves into the issue of internet history, and while Curran is right in pointing out the shortcomings of current literature on the subject and asking for historical revisionism, his attempt at providing a more global and inclusive historical account of the internet does little to mitigate those shortcomings and initiate the revision.
The second section of the book, by Des Freedman, discusses the political economy of the internet and includes a chapter under the title “Web 2.0 and the death of the blockbuster economy”, which is perhaps the highlight of the book. In it the author analyzes the complexities and contradictions of the internet economy by engaging with current literature on the subject and examining it in light of classic concerns within the political economy tradition—commodification, conglomeration and concentration, labor and exploitation. Without ignoring the transformative potential of digital networks, and while taking into consideration the relevance of collaboration, the digital commons and the “niche-economy”, Freedman shows how the overarching tendencies of capitalism, although at times wearing new clothes, also shape the digital media economy: “Many of the factors that were symptomatic of the ‘mass’ media economy—especially its propensity towards monopolisation, commodification and accumulation—are central to the dynamics of a new media economy shaped by the contradictory forces of the internet that promise dispersion but reward concentration and that fetishise openness but encourage proprietary behaviour” (p.92). The second part of this section offers an overview of the complexities of internet regulation. It discusses libertarian approaches, state intervention and consensual decision making by stakeholders, while reminding the reader of the increasing privatization of internet regulation and calling for a more nuanced and proactive approach to it.
The final section of the book addresses the issues of social networking, and of radical politics. In the chapter on social networks Fenton provides a nice counterbalance to the common and often shortsighted understanding of social networks in terms of horizontal communication, self-presentation and impression management. By discussing social media from an institutional perspective and placing the emphasis on the process of commodification, the author is able to discuss the complex implications of social networking in terms of democratic communication. In connection with the above, the final chapter of the book considers the claimed revival of radical oppositional politics on the internet. Using the examples of the UK student protests and the Iranian “green revolution”, Fenton concludes that “If there is a new politics emerging in new media it is a politics of non-representation; a politics of affect and antagonism. It includes a multiplicity of experiences that are contradictory and contingent” (p.169). This final chapter serves as a natural transition to the conclusion of the book, in which the authors make a call to action in order to create the conditions of a more democratic internet.
The book constitutes a useful addition to the current wave of literature aimed at tempering the excessive optimism of uncritical accounts of the internet’s ability to improve communication practices and institutions. And it is actually more successful at doing so when it does not explicitly try to prove that, as the title states, those accounts have misunderstood the internet. In fact, the alleged misunderstanding of the internet may be related to three different issues—mentioned but not clearly differentiated throughout the book. The first one concerns the capacity of the internet to effect change—on the economy, politics, people’s communication patterns, journalism, etc. In this regard, the authors conclude that the power of the internet has been greatly exaggerated or that, were we to grant the existence of change, everything has changed so that everything stays the same. The second level of misunderstanding has to do with the assessment of whether any actual change is positive or negative—and in which way. Here the verdict of the authors seems far from optimistic. But when attempting to discuss these two issues—the potential impact and the quality of that impact—the book falls into somewhat simplistic argumentation. Its contribution becomes richer when addressing a third, more complex level.
This third level of possible misunderstanding revolves around the relationship of technology and context and the dangers of taking technology as a powerful given. Misunderstanding here has to do not with getting it wrong, but with not seeing the whole picture. It springs from ignoring if and how issues such as policy and regulation, market dynamics, social movements and consumption patterns shape, limit or enhance the internet’s transformative potential. And it is in addressing this third level of misunderstanding that the authors are most successful. Through their engagement with existing literature on the internet, and their use of current examples, the authors provide a more nuanced and complex view of the different facets of the internet than is commonly offered. In fact, the book gains in interest as it gets further away from the idea of showing that the internet has been misunderstood and becomes less of a disputation and more of a description of the complex contextual factors that define the current state of the internet. In this sense, the book may have been better served with the title Contextualizing the Internet than with the one printed on its cover.