44 Distribute and Be Damned
train, to transport people and goods, in the service of transporting news,
and if they lived off the industry of such networks so, in turn, London
publishers – and indeed the rail networks themselves, maintained a parasitic relationship with the distributors. The Times of London and the
Pall Mall Gazette needed readers, and it was distributors who provided
those readers – a factor that Rupert Murdoch gravely had to face when
he backed down from his argument with Google in 2012.
Parasite media: in some ways, this is what all media is, a symbiosis
with other networks and systems, providing information and entertainment. When the relationship does indeed work as symbiosis, it provides
additional services and values that make it sustainable, which is why the
current rage for disruption within the distribution of media is so powerfully damaging: it is often hard to see how the shift from production
to distribution can be profitable for those who make the news. Yet to
recognise that both sides of this ecology – producer and distributor –
offer a vital part to the media ecology of news is an important step in
understanding how the media shapes our public sphere.
The transition from production to distribution did not begin with the
big tech companies that dominate this book: rather, they have taken
advantage of a situation that emerged in the 1990s out of government
and tertiary sector organisations, in particular universities and research
institutions. The development of the Internet as an open-source platform –
in particular the growth of the web out of the work by Tim Berners-Lee –
has been extremely well-documented, but of significance to this chapter
is how it became a commercial platform. The importance of business organisations in the spread and development of the Internet should not be
underestimated: my own very first encounters with the net in 1990 were
via a university account at a time when access to university was limited
to a much smaller proportion of the population than today. Commercial
Internet service providers began to appear in the late 1980s in the USA,
and for online communications to become more than a niche activity
for researchers, it was clear that businesses would have to become involved. The initial stages were modest, as with CompuServe’s gateway
to the National Science Foundation’s NSFNet at Ohio State University
in 1989, and the American government began slowly approving corporate use from 1988 onwards, but from 1994 onwards, especially as the
NSF began to disburse its assets, the Internet became a truly commercial
medium.
22
One of the first commentators to recognise the significance of this was
Nicholas Negroponte in his 1995 book Being Digital. Negroponte saw
that, across a swathe of media, users would eventually shift from relying
on networks that shifted atoms (such as newsagents delivering physical
newspapers, or shops renting video tapes) to those that distributed bits,
the data on the CDs, books, and paper documents that dominated the
information society of the mid-1990s. Negroponte’s predictions were
train, to transport people and goods, in the service of transporting news,
and if they lived off the industry of such networks so, in turn, London
publishers – and indeed the rail networks themselves, maintained a parasitic relationship with the distributors. The Times of London and the
Pall Mall Gazette needed readers, and it was distributors who provided
those readers – a factor that Rupert Murdoch gravely had to face when
he backed down from his argument with Google in 2012.
Parasite media: in some ways, this is what all media is, a symbiosis
with other networks and systems, providing information and entertainment. When the relationship does indeed work as symbiosis, it provides
additional services and values that make it sustainable, which is why the
current rage for disruption within the distribution of media is so powerfully damaging: it is often hard to see how the shift from production
to distribution can be profitable for those who make the news. Yet to
recognise that both sides of this ecology – producer and distributor –
offer a vital part to the media ecology of news is an important step in
understanding how the media shapes our public sphere.
The transition from production to distribution did not begin with the
big tech companies that dominate this book: rather, they have taken
advantage of a situation that emerged in the 1990s out of government
and tertiary sector organisations, in particular universities and research
institutions. The development of the Internet as an open-source platform –
in particular the growth of the web out of the work by Tim Berners-Lee –
has been extremely well-documented, but of significance to this chapter
is how it became a commercial platform. The importance of business organisations in the spread and development of the Internet should not be
underestimated: my own very first encounters with the net in 1990 were
via a university account at a time when access to university was limited
to a much smaller proportion of the population than today. Commercial
Internet service providers began to appear in the late 1980s in the USA,
and for online communications to become more than a niche activity
for researchers, it was clear that businesses would have to become involved. The initial stages were modest, as with CompuServe’s gateway
to the National Science Foundation’s NSFNet at Ohio State University
in 1989, and the American government began slowly approving corporate use from 1988 onwards, but from 1994 onwards, especially as the
NSF began to disburse its assets, the Internet became a truly commercial
medium.
22
One of the first commentators to recognise the significance of this was
Nicholas Negroponte in his 1995 book Being Digital. Negroponte saw
that, across a swathe of media, users would eventually shift from relying
on networks that shifted atoms (such as newsagents delivering physical
newspapers, or shops renting video tapes) to those that distributed bits,
the data on the CDs, books, and paper documents that dominated the
information society of the mid-1990s. Negroponte’s predictions were