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Critical Cultural Communication
The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet
2012 Honorable Mention from the Association of Internet Researchers for their Annual Best Book Prize
Outstanding Academic Title from 2011 by Choice Magazine
This book about America's romance with computer communication looks at the internet, not as harbinger of the future or the next big thing, but as an expression of the times. Streeter demonstrates that our ideas about what connected computers are for have been in constant flux since their invention. In the 1950s they were imagined as the means for fighting nuclear wars, in the 1960s as systems for bringing mathematical certainty to the messy complexity of social life, in the 1970s as countercultural playgrounds, in the 1980s as an icon for what's good about free markets, in the 1990s as a new frontier to be conquered and, by the late 1990s, as the transcendence of markets in an anarchist open source utopia.
The Net Effect teases out how culture has influenced the construction of the internet and how the structure of the internet has played a role in cultures of social and political thought. It argues that the internet's real and imagined anarchic qualities are not a product of the technology alone, but of the historical peculiarities of how it emerged and was embraced. Finding several different traditions at work in the development of the internet--most uniquely, romanticism--Streeter demonstrates how the creation of technology is shot through with profoundly cultural forces--with the deep weight of the remembered past, and the pressures of shared passions made articulate.
Outstanding Academic Title from 2011 by Choice Magazine
This book about America's romance with computer communication looks at the internet, not as harbinger of the future or the next big thing, but as an expression of the times. Streeter demonstrates that our ideas about what connected computers are for have been in constant flux since their invention. In the 1950s they were imagined as the means for fighting nuclear wars, in the 1960s as systems for bringing mathematical certainty to the messy complexity of social life, in the 1970s as countercultural playgrounds, in the 1980s as an icon for what's good about free markets, in the 1990s as a new frontier to be conquered and, by the late 1990s, as the transcendence of markets in an anarchist open source utopia.
The Net Effect teases out how culture has influenced the construction of the internet and how the structure of the internet has played a role in cultures of social and political thought. It argues that the internet's real and imagined anarchic qualities are not a product of the technology alone, but of the historical peculiarities of how it emerged and was embraced. Finding several different traditions at work in the development of the internet--most uniquely, romanticism--Streeter demonstrates how the creation of technology is shot through with profoundly cultural forces--with the deep weight of the remembered past, and the pressures of shared passions made articulate.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
240 pages, Paperback
First published December 5, 2010
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January 10, 2015
I’ve long wondered why people in my field of media studies seemed to have only a passing interest in historian Colin Campbell’s arguments in The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Blackwell, 1987). You might think that a field dedicated at least in part to exploring the guilty pleasures and manufactured desires of the entertainment might pay some attention to Campbell’s argument that in modernity, what people want isn’t pleasure or even the satiation of desire; it’s the desire to desire. Fortunately, in this book, Streeter picks up where Campbell’s intriguing arguments left off. Streeter points to how that the desire to desire, that longing for longing, has worked itself out in actually making the Internet what it has become today.
As Streeter foregrounds our desire to desire, his work counters two of the most often-cited stories about how the computer industry and the Internet developed. First, instead of “two guys in a garage,” he points to the slow and at times idiosyncratic bureaucratic processes that lay the foundation for the development of computers. It was largely these bureaucrats, he argues, who first encountered the possibilities in computing and who viewed computers not as calculators but as communication devices.
And second, Streeter acknowledges that whereas the Internet did receive a boost from a convergence of interests among the military, large corporations, and government interests as the popular story goes, the Internet’s exponential development needs to be understood in relation to those people, again, in the bureaucratic processes and other people in middle management and in service jobs, because these were the people who were doing their own word processing and experiencing the drudgery of working with code in the early 1990s.
People in this middle-level group, Streeter argues, were the ones who first found enchantment in the possibility that the Internet could grant them access to something countercultural, cool, and profoundly revolutionary. In this way, the Internet tapped into our desire to desire: our longing for something far beyond what we know. “Networked computing entered (the workplace) through the same portal as the copy machine,” he observes, reminding us that many workers experienced first-hand the thrill of having more access to knowledge and cache than our superiors when we knew more than they did about how computers worked.
Remember when the US Senator in charge of Internet regulation described the Internet as a series of pipes? Remember when Bush called it “the Internets?” We of the middle management throngs chortled at these absurd statements, even as we marveled at our supervisors’ inability to use even simple word processing or spread sheet programs. Those were the early, heady days in the rise of the Internet. In the 1990s and early 2000s, this experience with the Internet (and earlier, with office computer) gave a sense of power and mastery to those in the middle.
Streeter takes us back to the novel experience of buying one’s first computer, the experience of becoming engrossed in the possibilities that seemed endless as one first got online and gained access to previously-hidden communities of common interest, the exhilaration of first losing oneself in unexpected treasures while browsing online. Many of his readers will recognize at once our own wild romance with computers and the Internet.
But Streeter is no idealist; he’s aware that these thrills do not occur apart from embodied experience. Sure, the open source movement represented a time when engineers spoke passionately about code and worked arduously in development, often off the clock and for reasons other than profits. But the freedom to do all of that experimenting rested on the foundation of a particular social context. “Capitalism has always been afloat on a large body of unwaged labor,” he reminds us, and women have disproportionately performed the work necessary for social maintenance outside the realms of market exchange and for reasons other than profits (p. 178). But the belief in the power of individual genius was powerfully linked to the stories told about how computers and the Internet developed. This mythology of the computer programmer and even mere computer user as romantic hero provided unfettered support for free-market neoliberalism. We all wanted to see ourselves and our experiences with early computing machines in the ads that constructed us as consumers of Apple, Microsoft, and more: isolated individuals who could develop mastery and go on to produce greatness. The stories of countercultural entrepreneurs with superior technological skills fueled this fantasy and contributed to both the rise of the stock bubble and the anticipatory sense that anything could happen.
The Internet had a metaphorical power during an important phase in its development, as people across the political and economic spectrum fell in love once again with the possibilities of free expression.
I think people in university life are going to find this book exciting because in a sense it opens up a space for us to be romantics, too. Many of us who are mid-career and more senior were socialized into a belief that academic life meant learning to interact with colleagues whose default position was one of insouciance: things in the world were bad, they were going to get worse, and we professors were the poor luckless souls who recognized this and needed to impart this truth to our students. Yet today those of us who labor as professors, instructors, graduate assistants, and staffpersons live in a different context. Our work and our lives are defined by the economic recession, the anti-intellectualism that’s made critical thinking a suspect activity, and the concern that in a growing service economy, a liberal arts education isn’t worth the sticker price. It’s also harder than ever before to get a decent job in academia, because there are more indecent jobs in academia then ever before: universities increasingly rely on underpaid and overworked adjuncts and staff who work full time and live on salaries lower than some part-time dog groomers and home health aid workers. And with foci on outcome assessments, funding from sources outside the university, and pressure to “produce” within an arcane system of what’s worthwhile, Streeter’s work reminds us that there is enchantment in the idea that ideas matter. Narratives matter; they have shaped no less than the Internet itself, as Streeter argues: “The internet is open and disruptive, not because of anything inherent in the technology, but because historical circumstances allowed it to be narrated as open, because the stories that have become common ways of making sense of it have represented it as open, and in turn those stories have shaped the way it has been embraced and developed. The Internet is potentially open because people have made it so, and there is a lesson in that simple fact.” (p 169). I appreciated his romanticism about the guiding metaphors of the Internet, and it made me reflect on the similarly idealistic - and contested - understanding of the university as a space for enchantment, wonder, and possibility.
As Streeter foregrounds our desire to desire, his work counters two of the most often-cited stories about how the computer industry and the Internet developed. First, instead of “two guys in a garage,” he points to the slow and at times idiosyncratic bureaucratic processes that lay the foundation for the development of computers. It was largely these bureaucrats, he argues, who first encountered the possibilities in computing and who viewed computers not as calculators but as communication devices.
And second, Streeter acknowledges that whereas the Internet did receive a boost from a convergence of interests among the military, large corporations, and government interests as the popular story goes, the Internet’s exponential development needs to be understood in relation to those people, again, in the bureaucratic processes and other people in middle management and in service jobs, because these were the people who were doing their own word processing and experiencing the drudgery of working with code in the early 1990s.
People in this middle-level group, Streeter argues, were the ones who first found enchantment in the possibility that the Internet could grant them access to something countercultural, cool, and profoundly revolutionary. In this way, the Internet tapped into our desire to desire: our longing for something far beyond what we know. “Networked computing entered (the workplace) through the same portal as the copy machine,” he observes, reminding us that many workers experienced first-hand the thrill of having more access to knowledge and cache than our superiors when we knew more than they did about how computers worked.
Remember when the US Senator in charge of Internet regulation described the Internet as a series of pipes? Remember when Bush called it “the Internets?” We of the middle management throngs chortled at these absurd statements, even as we marveled at our supervisors’ inability to use even simple word processing or spread sheet programs. Those were the early, heady days in the rise of the Internet. In the 1990s and early 2000s, this experience with the Internet (and earlier, with office computer) gave a sense of power and mastery to those in the middle.
Streeter takes us back to the novel experience of buying one’s first computer, the experience of becoming engrossed in the possibilities that seemed endless as one first got online and gained access to previously-hidden communities of common interest, the exhilaration of first losing oneself in unexpected treasures while browsing online. Many of his readers will recognize at once our own wild romance with computers and the Internet.
But Streeter is no idealist; he’s aware that these thrills do not occur apart from embodied experience. Sure, the open source movement represented a time when engineers spoke passionately about code and worked arduously in development, often off the clock and for reasons other than profits. But the freedom to do all of that experimenting rested on the foundation of a particular social context. “Capitalism has always been afloat on a large body of unwaged labor,” he reminds us, and women have disproportionately performed the work necessary for social maintenance outside the realms of market exchange and for reasons other than profits (p. 178). But the belief in the power of individual genius was powerfully linked to the stories told about how computers and the Internet developed. This mythology of the computer programmer and even mere computer user as romantic hero provided unfettered support for free-market neoliberalism. We all wanted to see ourselves and our experiences with early computing machines in the ads that constructed us as consumers of Apple, Microsoft, and more: isolated individuals who could develop mastery and go on to produce greatness. The stories of countercultural entrepreneurs with superior technological skills fueled this fantasy and contributed to both the rise of the stock bubble and the anticipatory sense that anything could happen.
The Internet had a metaphorical power during an important phase in its development, as people across the political and economic spectrum fell in love once again with the possibilities of free expression.
I think people in university life are going to find this book exciting because in a sense it opens up a space for us to be romantics, too. Many of us who are mid-career and more senior were socialized into a belief that academic life meant learning to interact with colleagues whose default position was one of insouciance: things in the world were bad, they were going to get worse, and we professors were the poor luckless souls who recognized this and needed to impart this truth to our students. Yet today those of us who labor as professors, instructors, graduate assistants, and staffpersons live in a different context. Our work and our lives are defined by the economic recession, the anti-intellectualism that’s made critical thinking a suspect activity, and the concern that in a growing service economy, a liberal arts education isn’t worth the sticker price. It’s also harder than ever before to get a decent job in academia, because there are more indecent jobs in academia then ever before: universities increasingly rely on underpaid and overworked adjuncts and staff who work full time and live on salaries lower than some part-time dog groomers and home health aid workers. And with foci on outcome assessments, funding from sources outside the university, and pressure to “produce” within an arcane system of what’s worthwhile, Streeter’s work reminds us that there is enchantment in the idea that ideas matter. Narratives matter; they have shaped no less than the Internet itself, as Streeter argues: “The internet is open and disruptive, not because of anything inherent in the technology, but because historical circumstances allowed it to be narrated as open, because the stories that have become common ways of making sense of it have represented it as open, and in turn those stories have shaped the way it has been embraced and developed. The Internet is potentially open because people have made it so, and there is a lesson in that simple fact.” (p 169). I appreciated his romanticism about the guiding metaphors of the Internet, and it made me reflect on the similarly idealistic - and contested - understanding of the university as a space for enchantment, wonder, and possibility.
January 7, 2013
Thought-provoking and original. I learned things I didn't know and found myself rethinking things I did.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews