notes on "The age of permanent net revolution" by John Naughton

• 1993 – the world wide web takes off
• the web is estimated to contain more than 3,000 billion pages and is growing by 25,000 pages an hour.
• this has created a revolutionary transformation of our environment.
• “endism” – the perspective that sees new technologies as replacing older ones (John Seely) eg. CD-rom predicted as a replacement for the printed book.
• although replacements such as this never came to be, the interactions between new and old media became more complex.
• led to the notion of media ecology (cultural critic Neil Postman) – the dominant ‘organism’ was broadcast TV but this is now in decline as the audience is fragmenting.
• the fragmenting audience no longer suits the business model of broadcast TV, which depended on attracting mass audiences.
• broadcast TV is being taken over by digital TV and will soon be devastated by Internet Protocol TV (IPtv).
• new media technologies enable viewers to determine their own viewing schedules and (more significantly) to avoid ads
• the era of ‘appointment-to-view’ TV is coming to an end
• it will however continue to exist as some things are best covered using few-to-many technology
• the net and the web are NOT synonymous
• the web is enormous BUT is only a part of the internet
• the next generation will live in an environment dominated by the net
• broadcast TV is a ‘push’ medium – producers decide the content, create it and push it down analogue or digital audiences at audiences
• the web is a ‘pull’ medium – user is in charge; they decide what they view/use
• the switch from push to pull is a radical increase in consumer sovereignty
• the emergence of a truly sovereign, informed consumer is thus one of the implications of an internet-centric world
• the underlying assumption of the old broadcast model was that audiences were passive and uncreative.
• passivity may have been due to the absence of tools and publication opportunities than to intrinsic defects in human nature.
• new blogs are being created every second
• the traffic in ideas and cultural products isn’t a one-way-street – as it was in the old push-media ecology
• number of people watching TV has fallen in recent years
• 24-34 y.o. fell by 2.5% between December 2003 and 2004
• 16-24 y.o. fell by 2.9% in the same period
• however, broadband connections rose more than 60% in 2004
• in the US, under-25s spend more time on the internet instead of watching TV