Cyberspace Culture
JoAnn Warcholic Ashman, in this issue's "Expressions" essay, observes that "technology has created a new future for all of us." The specific technology she is referring to is computer technology. Her company, Warner Music Group, is part of the Time Warner media enterprise, a corporation that provides products and services in the cable television, publishing, music, and movie industries. The company owns CNN, HBO, Warner Bros., and other entities—"brands," in marketing lingo—that are household words in our nation today.
Time Warner is the descendant of two pioneering media companies that were founded more than 75 years ago: Time magazine and Warner Bros. motion pictures. These companies merged in 1989, then merged again in 1996 with Turner Broadcasting. Magazines, movies, and television—communications media that have been mainstays of American culture for more than half a century—are at the heart of a corporation that is about to move in a very big way into a communications medium that most people became aware of less than five years ago: the Internet.
I use the word "culture" here very deliberately, because Time Warner and its competitors are the primary communicators of our society's creative and intellectual work, and our common values. From Entertainment Weekly magazine to the novels of Nicholas Sparks to a scholarly biography of Richard J. Daley, from The Drew Carey Show to The Matrix to Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, from Larry King Live to Sports Tonight to the Cartoon Network, from Hootie and the Blowfish to Metallica to Natalie Cole, Time Warner is a primary conduit through which our national culture flows.
For most of its history and most of its products, Time Warner has been a one-way conveyor and even a guardian of cultural content. Through processes of cultivation and elimination that are expensive, time-consuming, and based on artistic concerns as well as financial ones, publishers and producers have decided which stories are told to the public, which movies are presented to the public, and which music is recorded for and played by the public. This is true of other media companies, not just Time Warner.
The Internet, though, has changed the paradigm. The web is wonderfully egalitarian. Americans are publishing their own novels and magazines, putting their own garage band recordings and video productions on web sites that are accessible to anyone at any time for the cost of owning a desktop computer system and maintaining an Internet service account.
The quality of all this cultural product varies widely, of course. Do we really want to read books that no editor has ever seen? Or watch videos that only the creator has screened before posting them on the web? Probably not. The point is, nobody can tell us not to waste our time doing so, and we can send our own creations and ideas out to the world without hesitation and without involving anyone else in the process.
There is room for everybody and everything in cyberspace. If Time Warner's proposed merger with America Online—the largest and best-known Internet service and content provider on the planet—is approved, we will see an unprecedented synergy developing between culture creators, culture observers, culture consumers, and culture communicators. And, of course, culture retailers.
The Internet is built and they are coming, by the millions. And they are using it in ways nobody who ever had a Bitnet e-mail account or visited a Gopher hole could have foreseen.
—T.S.C.
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