Fleras: Rhetoric and Reality ( p.269) Rhetoric & Reality - Subversive/Freewheel
- Egalitarian
- Anarchic Power to the People
- Globalizing
- Free
- Empowering and Enlightening
- Diversity
- Corporatized/Control
- Ehaves/Ehavenots
- Authoritarian power to the dollar
- Americanizing
- Marketing and Advertising
- Make Money
- Conformity
Social Issues: Surveillance - Network architecture is now “smart”
- Before, telcos did not know the content of messages
- Now, they do. Bits are monitored, stored in charting flow and effective service
- Nortel and Cisco can establish network architectures which:
- Identify each traffic type-Web, email, voice, video…and isolate the type of application even down to specific brands, by the interface used, by the user typeand individual user identification or by the site address (winseck:331)
Surveillance 2 - Rise of “cookies” ( spies on content, personal information and preferences jeapordizing privacy)
- Technological potential of building a complete ‘data shadow’ of the consumer, to better market to them
- Emerging self regulation of services
- Eg restrictive private contracts for use, limiting video downloads, for example, in absence of regulation permitting it.
- Or: @Home…wide open powers to remove offensive matter which is too prone to authoritarian censorship
- Still major fights: first over spam ( reaccessing your email accounts, and next data shadowing/market surveillance)
The Walled Garden - AOL Time Warner term
- Disney too
- Keep users within designated zones for as long as possible ( Winseck, 335)
- How?
- By creation of content and service menus, organization of hyperlinks, bias of search engings, network architecture, promotion, content synergies,elimination of bypasses
- Creation of walled gardens: safe, predictable, branded
- Eg: Disney assumes role of immigration officer in AOL’s world: if people enter their site, and then leave AOL, contract can be cancelled ( Winseck, 336)
The Information Gap - Rest of the World is less than one-tenth on the way to cyberspace
- Vast continents ( Africa) left out of “global information highway”
- Rich consumers and those educated elites the first to embrace computers and the Internet
- Poor, uneducated slow: many countries do not have policies to help individuals(eg. Computers in the home), although do help schools
The Knowledge Gap - Information and Knowledge gap is widening: despite mass penetration of the Internet in Canada, still high levels of illiteracy, ( under 25%) relatively low levels of university education ( several points below Europe), and growing child poverty: estimates place one in four to one in three kids below poverty level
- Structurally higher levels of unemployment, precarious jobs
- Gendered landscape of technological control
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