The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet (review)

The recent untimely death of Steve Jobs serves as a reminder of how much computers, once thought to represent the ultimate in impersonal experience and dehumanization, have come to be identified with larger-than-life personalities, whether it is the archetypal nerd Bill Gates, the somewhat obsessive bad boy Mark Zuckerberg, or the insanely cool Mr. Jobs. Their stories, as popularized and celebrated by various types of media, provide new renditions for the digital age of longstanding American myths concerning inventors, entrepreneurs, and the American dream.

If these portrayals contain a kernel of truth, they also serve to mystify the public about the larger, more complex processes involved in technological innovation and the resulting cultural change. Research on the history of technology may aim to set the record straight, but does not necessarily address the source of popular misconceptions about the nature of invention and the diffusion of innovations. By way of contrast, the strength of Thomas Streeter’s study is not in its history of computer communication and the Internet, but in its presentation and critique of popular discourse concerning the computer and related technologies over the second half of the twentieth century. It is a cultural history, one informed by ideological analysis, but in the tradition of American cultural studies, as inaugurated by James W. Carey, and therefore does not drown the reader in jargon-heavy critical analysis. Rather, it emphasizes historical detail and a meta-theoretical view that deconstructs popular culture and intellectual discourse alike.

Streeter’s main point is that discourse relating to computers and the Internet has long been characterized by a strong element of individualism, a myth central to dominant ideology in capitalist societies. He specifically analyzes the late-twentieth-century discourse of corporate liberalism, which he defines as “the broad idea that government and industry should cooperate at key moments in the name of furthering the intertwined processes of economic and technological development” (p. 24). In this discourse, the romantic ideal of the free-thinking individual and free enterprise is maintained despite the growing power of the government-industrial complex—one that also involves our institutions of higher education.

Streeter traces the persistence of this form of romanticism through such changes in computer technology and culture as: the shift from batch processing to interactive computing, the counterculture’s embrace of computer technology, the introduction of the microcomputer (and how it came to be known as the “personal” computer), the popularization of the Internet and ensuing debates over its identity (e.g., the information superhighway vs. cyberspace), and issues concerning intellectual property in light of digital technology and the open source movement. Perhaps his most telling argument is the fact that the popular press focused almost exclusively on the personal computer during the 1980s, and on individuals such as Jobs and Gates. In so doing, it completely overlooked the story of the evolving and expanding computer networks that became the Internet, an event of equal if not greater importance, though it was the product of massive collaboration among universities, the military, and other large-scale organizations.

The author sets out to discuss the ways in which computer technology and the Internet are social constructions, reflections of the culture from which they emerged, and within those parameters he offers a study that is solid, scholarly, and readable. Questions remain, however, for those of us looking for a bit more forest to go with our trees; that is, those interested in considering the consequences of technologies on culture and society once they are adopted, consequences that often are unintended and unimagined by those who introduce them. However much technology may be a human invention and a cultural creation, the fact remains that, in the words of the media ecology scholar John Culkin, we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. Individualism, for example, first formed in the literate cultures of the ancient world, but it took hold with the emergence of print culture in early modern Europe. But...