ABSTRACT
This is an analysis proposed by a number of technology theorists in the 1990s who, galvanized by the promise of a ‘new economy’ driven by a rapidly expanding Internet, argued that the business models and industrial structures of the traditional media would eventually be superseded by the more streamlined and fluid character of the digital universe. Nicholas Negroponte, Alvin Toffler, Esther Dyson and George Gilder all championed the logic of ‘bits’ over ‘atoms’, celebrated the wave of creativity unleashed via the Internet, predicted a shift of power
from media bureaucracies to digital networks, and spoke in rather apocalyptic terms of the future of the ‘old media’. ‘Moving authority from elites and establishments,’ wrote Gilder, ‘the new technologies drastically change the cultural balance of power.’ Everyone else ‘will have to change or crash’ (Gilder 1994).
