Mark, thanks for this - a bit in haste, but I want to dash off a reply anyway. It won't surprise you that I have a kind of inverse but complementary view - first up, I want to suggest this: the fact that commercial motivations drive the development of platforms for cultural participation and public communication does not in itself negate their public, social and cultural value. However, the commercial imperatives of platform providers introduce genuinely new and difficult questions, precisely because their ways of engaging us as users, their regulatory mechanisms, their governance structures etc etc take little or no account of their role in producing public good. Where you say Google's "provision of "free" services makes it come to feel more like a public utility than a cutthroat commercial entity", I say it in some ways actually *is* a public utility. And in fact our participation via these platforms already includes the practices of citizenship. We have seen this with acute examples like Buzz, but also people (including me and Joshua Green) have written about issues like public archives - when YouTube is in some ways a more comprehensive repository of popular memory than many publicly funded cultural institutions, without any public responsibility (other than complying with corporate regulation), where does that leave us? I struggle to imagine how something like a public service charter could be imposed on a global giant that has already run away with the whole game; however it's useful to think through the role of state-based regulation in terms other than "Censorship!". I also think your fantasy/plan is a great thought experiment - especially thinking through what transnational service provision might look like; how publicly funded enterprises can innovate, and so on. As you say, kind of big questions! But then thirdly, just because I want to say it (and not necessarily to you personally), I must say as a cultural studies scholar I can't accept the false consciousness explanation for how Googlespacebooktube have come to be popular in the first place (we are seduced by the tools of our own enslavement which we misrecognise as agency - by which one must mean, *other* people suffer from this misrecognition). If we want to dream of alternatives, then we need to understand this too, not as seduction/manipulation, but in terms of an invitation to participate. Although replicating the scale of Google is impossible and possibly undesirable, how can not-for-profit, open source platforms, public service providers etc create the same popular warmth of invitation and insistence on usability above all that make Google, facebook, youtube, the iphone etc etc commercially successful? [With the proviso that we obviously agree that Google's recent behaviour has been anything but warm and gentle]. Jean On 17/02/10 12:56 PM, "Andrejevic, Mark" <mark-andrejevic@uiowa.edu> wrote:
Thanks to Jean for this post, which opens up the big questions, in particular: "How might we ask to be addressed as citizens instead or as well?" One of the things that has struck me about Google for some time now is its ambition to take over functions that I think of as being appropriate for public utility providers or public service providers rather than commercial entities. Its ambition, for example, to serve as a global digital library, or as a high-speed broadband provider for the US or as the (e)mail service and document storage service for educational institutions, and so on. In its own upbeat way Google is the uber-privatizer of the neoliberal era. And in some ways its provision of "free" services makes it come to feel more like a public utility than a cutthroat commercial entity -- it's not (directly) selling us anything, but providing us with seemingly free services the way other public service entities do. When I see it functioning this way, it just becomes so temp ting to fantasize about taking it over and turning it into a public utility or a public service corporation. I understand the shortcomings of doing this with respect to competition-fueled innovation (and the fact that utilities tend not to operate at the transnational level). But there would be certain advantages in terms of transparency, accountability, and cross-subsidization (depending on the kind of tax or fee system that could be used to support it). Not to mention that it wouldn't need to store and capture all the data it now collects for commercial purposes or to experiment with ways to use this information to promote consumption of various kinds. I think freely available broadband should be constructed along the lines of a public utility -- but Google is ahead of the game, already considering how it might provide "free" (commercially supported) broadband, thereby not only increasing its audience, but claiming the tremendous amounts of data that it will thereby be abl e to collect. It's hard to imagine that the payoff for collecting and using this info would offset the costs of storing it, but that, of course, is the wager of the emerging commercial model. It seems to have worked out for Google so far.
In any case, the internet itself suggests that our imagined possibilities for the provision of digital services needn't be limited to the horizons of the commercial marketplace. It seems worth resisting critiques that take this horizon as a given.
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