It may be an emerging technology but the internet isn’t changing a thing. I don’t mean literally of course. The internet is changing the primary format of communication and it is certainly changing the way our brains work, the way synapses grow, and has definitely impacted our ability to concentrate or to stay focused. But I mean the big stuff. “Cyber Utopians,” as one writer calls them, must be going through the kind of withdrawal now being suffered by Obamatons. The real and big change they thought was coming just isn’t.
And as if to remind everyone of all this earlier this month the keepers of ideas have initiated the “Copyright Alert System” to let you know when your network is being used to illegally download their stuff. This, as they say, will allow eventually for a “safe and legal” internet experience for us all. Of course, as a subset of intellectual property rights, copyrights are about ownership and control of thought and the “safety” desired is simply the protection for big business to subjugate the limitlessness of the internet to corporate control. This agreement between internet service providers and the television and film industries, is about assuring that only they can determine what is considered legal or sanctioned communication. Hence, this becomes, in the words of a music industry lobbyist, a “groundbreaking agreement” that “ushers in a new day and a fresh approach to addressing the digital theft of copyrighted works.”
The agreement does not currently add any “new laws or regulations” nor does it carry threats of account termination for those warned by this system of illegal trafficking of copyrighted materials. In fact, their claim is that the new Center for Copyright Information will use these warnings to spread the gospel of copyright’s importance. And, of course, it is. The new center is another front for the major music labels, film and television studios and is designed to promote an ideology of copyright, one based on the mythology of copyright protecting artists who now so emboldened feel free to produce more art which in turn benefits us all. Aside from the pure nonsense that artistry is suppressed absent copyright protection is the basic fact that artists rarely if ever own their own copyright. So this is just recycled branding and defense of the already well-defended.
More importantly, this is about assuring that “new” media technology succumb to established social norms and order. These warnings can easily morph into greater ordering of the internet’s content. Existing research already suggests we are headed there, where a “Googlearchy” is emerging that more than replicates media consolidation elsewhere. Here, as Matthew Hindman explains, since 25% of all internet traffic is porn, email, and search engines, only 3-4% goes to news and only 1-2/10 of a percent go to political blogs, it is actually easier for media giants to gobble up more of what little space is available. Major newspapers have more of their market locked up online, roughly 30%, than in print where they still only have about 20%. And as we’ve shown before the internet does nothing to change the range of popular topics covered in online news and very little of that news deals directly with Black people and other so-called “minorities.”
Most importantly, the newer medium has had zero impact in changing our most deeply-held attitudes towards one another. As said by the previously-referenced author and internet critic Evgeny Morozov, new media technology often “only aggravate existing social problems.” But, to prove his point he, well, proved his point! Morozov’s example was taken from a leading conservative economic newspaper and their reasoning behind a claim against providing the war-torn Sudan with computers. Given that, according to Morozov, they only know a “culture of pervasive corruption” computers would be useless since Sudanese are more accustomed to, he says, “staging ambushes than typing on laptops.” Computers and the internet won’t stop African corruption any more than they will stop the Western imperialism that encourages it or the binding Euro-centricity with which even the White Left tends to interpret the rest of the world.