ABSTRACT
The premise upon which state media and communications policy was based during the 1980s and 1990s was that a combination of digital technology and free markets would bring rich and diverse media offerings to consumers and a boost to the general economy. Although the two are sometimes conflated, the technical benefits of digitisation and the economic benefits of free markets are logically independent. Indeed, as we have seen in the previous chapter, deregulation and privatisation, which began in the early 1980s, preceded the introduction of digital technologies in the 1990s. The rhetoric associated with these changes was that they would allow the fresh wind of competition to blow through the formerly monopolistic broadcasting and telecommunications industries. This view is also shared by a number of commentators such as Alvin Toffler and Nicholas Negroponte who believe that digital media technologies (and particularly the Internet) will spell the demise of the large monopolistic mass-media corporation. According to them a competitive market in multimedia products will take the place of monopoly, precipitating ‘de-massification of the media’1 in which ‘the monolithic empires of mass media . . . dissolve into an array of cottage industries’.2 Typical of this optimistic belief that new media technologies will result in ever widening choices and a consequent empowerment of media ‘consumers’, is the
introduction to the US government’s The National Information Infrastructure: The Administration’s Agenda for Action, published in 1993, which asks its readers to:
Imagine you had a device that combined a telephone, a TV, a camcorder, and a personal computer. No matter where you went or what time it was, your child could see you and talk to you, you could watch a replay of your team’s last game, you could browse the latest editions to the library, or you could find the best prices in town on groceries, furniture, clothes –whatever you needed [ . . . ] you could see the latest movies, play the hottest video games, or bank and shop from the comfort of your home whenever you chose.3
