Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

by Robert W. McChesney

Celebrants and skeptics alike have produced valuable analyses of the Internet's effect on us and our world, oscillating between utopian bliss and dystopian hell. But according to Robert W. McChesney, arguments on both sides fail to address the relationship between economic power and the digital world.

McChesney's award-winning Rich Media, Poor Democracy skewered the assumption that a society drenched in commercial information is a democratic one. In Digital Disconnect , McChesney returns to this provocative thesis in light of the advances of the digital age. He argues that the sharp decline in the enforcement of antitrust violations, the increase in patents on digital technology and proprietary systems and massive indirect subsidies and other policies have made the internet a place of numbing commercialism. A handful of monopolies now dominate the political economy, from Google, which garners a 97 percent share of the mobile search market, to Microsoft, whose operating system is used by over 90 percent of the world's computers. Capitalism's colonization of the Internet has spurred the collapse of credible journalism and made the Internet an unparalleled apparatus for government and corporate surveillance and a disturbingly antidemocratic force.

In Digital Disconnect , Robert McChesney offers a groundbreaking critique of the Internet, urging us to reclaim the democratizing potential of the digital revolution while we still can.

Genres: Nonfiction

320 pages, Hardcover

First published March 5, 2013

About the author

Robert Waterman McChesney was an American professor notable in the history and political economy of communications, and the role media play in democratic and capitalist societies. He was the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He co-founded the Free Press, a national media reform organization. From 2002 to 2012, he hosted Media Matters, a weekly radio program every Sunday afternoon on WILL (AM), Illinois Public Media radio.

Reviews

[Joan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had the same reaction as I've had to almost every non-fiction book I've read over the last 10 years, to wit: There simply isn't an entire book's worth of material here. I have heard McChesney speak about this topic on various public-radio and Pacifica programs. His main idea is very simple and could have been stated coherently in a long-form magazine article. Usually, I read a NYTimes magazine article about a topic and then try to read the book from which the article was excerpted. Inevitably, I wind up thinking "why did this author have to write a whole book? The magazine article contained all of the main ideas and was actually easy and pleasant to read."

[Alexander Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book, although useful from a journalistic perspective, is not an economically accurate understanding of the internet. This book is out of line in claiming capitalism to be the major issue of the internet's colonization. More accurately, it can be said that big business has been investing in skewing governmental views through well funded interest groups and lobbying. This is what is known as "Crony Capitalism" and is an interference of powerful companies in government, not what is Adam Smith's idea of capitalistic economy.