A Mediological View
Martin Irvine
The Internet is formed by multiple mediations: institutional, political, technical, economic, historical.
- Is the Internet a "medium" or a system of mediums and mediations?
- What are the structures and preconditions for the Internet to have developed and enabled the "network of networks" around the world?
Hierarchization of media and information systems in the contemporary mediasphere:
- how has the Internet enabled the ongoing redistribution of value among all media forms in our media system?
- what is different about the network platform for -- and distribution of -- digital/digitized media?
How the World is Connected:
Internet Topology and Topography Maps are Proxies for Centers of Globalization and Resource Concentration
- Submarine Cable Map (ownership, connection points, connectivity)
- Telegeography Maps
- How is the global Internet managed? Like globalization, it is enacted by many state and private actors.
Global Internet Map, 2006, Telegeography. Click for large image.
Internet Global Traffic Map, 2010, Telegeography. Click for large image.
Internet Technologies: the mediating material means of the medium
- Components, preconditions, and issues:
- Telecom data lines: standardization, interconnection
- Computers with data connectivity
- TCP/IP protocols: why all computers can be programmed to interconnect with the Internet
- Internet and Web protocols, file standards
- Standardization of data communication hardware: routers, switches
- Software: the interface to Internet/Web functions
- Internet service providers: local to global
The Mediating Social-Institutional Environment:
the social conditions
for deployment of the medium, cultural acceptance and reception, cultural
embeddedness of technology
- Policy and regulation: unregulated development of computer technology
- Unregulated data services over telecom lines
- Mass market of low-cost PCs
- Ubiquity of PCs with data connections at workplace and home
- Multiple devices and mediating technologies, wired and wireless, handheld to huge servers
- GUI: Web and hypertext developed parallel to rise of GUI
- Domestication of computer technology: networked computers now in bedrooms, livingrooms, dorm rooms, libraries: no longer a "high tech" technology
- Generation of new networks around presence/absence or access/no access to the Internet
- Internet and daily life: communications, content, distance, simultaneity, real-time living, acceleration
- Platform for globally distributed systems for all digital media: cross-mediation of all content and digital forms: text, images, graphics, sound and voice, film/video/TV.
Internet Governance: Standards, International Cooperation, Regulation
- W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
- ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)
- IANA (The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority)
The Future