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Ubiquitous Media and the Revival of Participatory Culture

Written by Jack Brighton on Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Mass media technologies historically have been controlled by elite minorities. Not surprisingly, the products, authorship, and distribution patterns of media have largely served the interests of their masters.

To be sure, many efforts have been made to establish models of public service media in pursuit of the “public interest, convenience, and necessity.” (McChesney, 1993) But domination of media control by political and corporate elites, made possible by the demands of existing media technologies and economies, has largely tipped the balance in favor of private, commercial, and political interests.

The emergence of broadcasting brought consolidation of media control to a new peak, by entrenching a literal “one-to-many” relationship between authors and audience. This model encodes an equation of authorship with authority, and audience with passivity. The technical and economic demands of broadcasting and of “professional journalism” have effectively discouraged participation in media-making by individuals and non-professional groups.

What happens if this is no longer the case? What would it mean if anyone could create, publish, and share media on a global scale? We’re not quite there yet, but the concept of a ubiquitous open media system, for the first time in the history of media, no longer seems far fetched. Several large barriers and contested areas of interest remain unresolved: intellectual property law, proprietary systems and formats, and resistance from established media models and entities, to name a few. But for those of us interested in public service media, we now have enough examples of “participatory ubimedia” to move forward with some confidence, perhaps even hope.

Digital Depression

In early 2003 I found myself in a state of despair over the direction of news media on the Internet.  I had just attended the first annual conference of the Integrated Media Association, a sort of think-tank for public broadcasting on the web.  The keynote speaker was Merrill Brown, Senior Vice President at RealNetworks, who unveiled the company’s new (and short-lived) marketing slogan “All You Need is One.”  That would be the RealOne player, which in Brown’s RealSpeak is a “consumer appliance, not the piece of software.” Actually the RealOne player was more than that.  It was an all-purpose digital rights management system, the core of a new media business model.  And Brown brought the announcement of a major new media business breakthrough: an exclusive deal with CNN to stream online news video only through the RealOne paid subscription service. 

Many of my colleagues were nodding their heads.  We were all scrambling for ways to cover costs for streaming our public radio and TV content.  Those costs include expensive servers and lots of bandwidth, which for most public stations could total $1000 to $10,000 per month depending on the scale. The “streaming conundrum” held that the more successful you become at developing an audience for online media, the less you could afford it.  If you succeed, you fail.  Unless you find ways to make users pay for the service, said Merrill Brown, and suddenly we were talking about subscription models and charging people for public TV and radio content on the web.  We were advised by resident gurus and industry consultants to adopt a “shopping mall” model for online media, serving boutique content to affluent customers and low-quality bits for the freeloaders. 

I came up in journalism during a time when we considered our work vital to the health of community, democracy, and culture, when our product was in essence not media but informed and engaged citizens.  In public broadcasting we’re supposed to be shining a light on the world, exploring histories and cultures, and helping people understand other peoples’ stories. You can have that for a monthly charge of $29.95?  I couldn’t imagine hustling that.  Some of us thought the promise of the Internet was to make information accessible, not lock it behind firewalls and logins.  We believed public media should be public, and users shouldn’t have to subscribe to it unless it’s a free RSS feed.  So we declared ourselves “open content radicals,” and began plotting ways to steer the public broadcasting system toward an open media philosophy.  We launched a web site focused on methods of sharing content as “open source media.” (Brighton & Tynan, 2006)  We got busy developing a metadata standard and technical infrastructure for publishing and aggregating media collections throughout the public broadcasting system, to make content findable and more useful for audiences everywhere.  And we vowed an ongoing conspiracy to undermine the shopping mall metaphor in favor of a public library model for public media on the web.

Flash forward to 2007. Broadband penetration in U.S. homes reached over 80 percent.(King, 2007)  In January 2007 alone, 123 million people in the United States viewed 7.2 billion videos online.  For ages 18 to 26, Internet use has surpassed television.(Borland, 2007)  And at the Integrated Media Association annual conference in Boston in February 2007, no one was still talking about charging users for access to online news.  Almost everyone in the public broadcasting system has become focused on how to make content freely available, how to better catalog it and expose its metadata.  The BBC plans to put its entire archive online for free, (Robinson, 2007) and we’re taking this as our own mandate in the U.S. We’re now talking about open source web applications, social networking, Creative Commons licensing, and user-generated content. By now even most commercial news organizations can read the writing on the blog.  The Chicago Tribune launched a community journalism web site with the majority of its content written by readers.  TV news can’t cover breaking events with its own reduced news staff, but it can broadcast cell phone video emailed in by viewers.  Multimedia is exploding on the Internet, mostly created by non-professionals.  “With today’s technology,” says filmmaker Michael Wiese, “there is absolutely nothing to stop anyone from having a good idea and expressing it visually.” (News-Gazette, 2007)  Adds Wall Street Journal technology columnist Lee Gomes, “Anyone who wants to create a TV channel just needs a computer and a Web address.” (Gomes, 2007)  With a growing number of free hosting providers, you don’t even need your own server.  Anyone with a valid email address can now publish media.  Four years after Merrill Brown’s “breakthrough,” CNN is no longer charging for access to its online archives.

We might call it the YouTube Effect.  It certainly had nothing to do with our little open content conspiracy in public broadcasting.  The truth is that Merrill Brown and company got it wrong by almost 180 degrees: The online media business model isn’t about serving content to passive consumers through a rights-controlled bottleneck.  It’s about people freely creating and sharing stories, passions, and ideas.  We are not “users” or “consumers” of online media so much as we are members of a global media community made possible by amazing inexpensive media tools and the interconnection of everything.  Put another way, what we used to call The Media has lost control of the media.  And if you care about community and democracy, this is a very hopeful turn of events.

But is this dawning of ubiquitous open media for all just another passing moment?  Is the very idea of universal and free public media simply the fantasy of a few open content radicals?  We still have some work to do, but we can hardly do worse than the era we hope is now passing.

A Short History of Broadcasting, in Which Media Becomes Unfree

The phrase “new media” could be applied in many times and places during our experiments with literacy and communications technology.  Once upon a time, a new technology called wireless telegraphy was developed by scientists and inventors, credited primarily to Nikola Tesla, Guglielmo Marconi, and Alexander Popov. (Wikipedia, 2007)  What we now call radio was understood in the early 20th century as a point-to-point medium, i.e. an improvement on wired telegraphy.  By the time Marconi received a patent for the invention of radio in 1904, the U.S. had already been well-wired for telegraphy, and the corporation that controlled most of those wires, Western Union, saw no profit in making them obsolete.  But one place where wires couldn’t reach was a ship at sea, so on April 14th, 1912 when the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg, the world learned of the unfolding tragedy by way of a “point-to-point” radio transmission from the ship.  The message was received by a Marconi employee named David Sarnoff, operating the wireless telegraph in New York’s Wanamaker Department Store.  Over the next two days Sarnoff relayed the names of survivors to a public eager for news, serving as one of the very few “points” of reception from the news source at sea.  The experience for Sarnoff was a revelation: If one could expand the number of receivers, wireless telegraphy would no longer be merely point-to-point, but one-to-many.  In that instant, the idea of radio as a mass medium was born.

Sadly for open content radicals, the story of radio soon took a proprietary turn.  Sarnoff pursued his vision of “broadcasting” at helm of the Radio Corporation of America, a creation of General Electric after its purchase of the American Marconi company.  RCA began marketing a “radio music box” for home use, and by 1922 a growing number of “broadcasters” were driving mass demand for the new media device.  “A significant percentage of the stations were operated by nonprofit organizations like religious groups, civic organizations, labor unions, and in particular, colleges and universities,” writes Robert McChesney in his classic history of broadcasting in the U.S. (McChesney, 1993)  While Chicago had commercial station WLS (for World’s Largest Store, owned by Sears Roebuck & Co.), it also had WCFL (run by the Chicago Federation of Labor).  But the proliferation of radio transmitters run by “amateurs,” schools, and community organizations lead to a conflict over rights to the electromagnetic spectrum on which broadcasting depends.  The drafting of the Federal Radio Act of 1927 became a high-stakes contest between a few increasingly powerful commercial radio corporations, and a larger but fragmented group of nonprofit radio operators and enthusiasts.  A quick scan through the radio dial today will reveal all you need to know about who won.

But before we jettison radio as a medium for community, education, and democracy, let’s consider what it would take to start your own station today.  You must first conduct a frequency search over a 30-mile radius from your intended transmitter site, after which you may (if you find an available frequency) file a Petition for Rulemaking with the FCC with a fee of $1795.  Within 90 days, the FCC will issue a public notice called the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.  After a period of public comment, the FCC has nine months to issue a Report and Order declaring an acceptance or rejection of your Petition.  If your Petition is accepted, the FCC will open a 30-day auction for the frequency you selected, during which you and anyone else may file a bid (with filing fee) to operate a station using that frequency.  You may now file FCC Form 175 (along with engineering work from FCC Form 301 and another fee) to inform the Commission about your technical plans.  The FCC has 30 days to accept this form, and another 30 days for public comment before accepting your Form “Accepted for Filing.”  If you win the frequency auction, you must then submit a complete FCC Form 301, along with another filing fee.  If approved by the FCC, you will be awarded a Construction Permit within 90 days.  You are now about 92 weeks into the process, and have paid more than $9000 in engineering and application fees.  But good news!  You now have 36 months to build your radio station, including studios and production facilities, tower, antenna, and transmitter.  If your ambitions are meager you might accomplish this for a million dollars or less, but more likely much more.  The costs for maintaining and staffing your station will be in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year at minimum.

We could replace the word “radio” with “television” in the above paragraph, and multiply the cost factors by at least 10.  Except you won’t find an available frequency in any area that’s actually populated, and if by some miracle you do you’ll be outbid by one of the dwindling number of large broadcast corporations.  That, for the most part, is broadcasting in America, and it’s why radio and television have become increasingly irrelevant to the communities they ostensibly serve.

Which leads us to our first bullet-point worthy dictum:

• Media technologies and economies that require a corporate structure for functionality and viability will tend to empower the corporate structure.

In general, TV and radio broadcasting hasn’t worked for people and communities.  The requirements of organization and capital raise the entrance barrier too high for all but a wealthy few.  The few owners then must monetize the attention of their audience by selling your eyes and ears to advertisers.  The flow of broadcast media is from them to you, and your job is to receive the message they send.  Your only “choice” is to change the channel or turn off the receiver, thus disengaging from the medium.  In essence, while you remain engaged, you work for them.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Scott-Heron, 1970)

Just a century ago most Americans celebrated their arts and cultural heritage by actively participating in them.  Before we had access to mass-produced news and entertainment, we made our own.  People told family stories and shared what news they had, made more dear by its scarcity.  Families made music together, and the influx of musical traditions and instruments fueled an American folk music culture that lead to Jazz, Blues, and their offspring.  “Everyone was encouraged to take part, both men and women, from practiced musicians to visitors and children, and in the nineteenth-century home the quality might at times be excellent,” writes music historian Tim Brookes.  “Yet in a sense that was not the point…it was an active, participatory tradition as opposed to the passive listening to radio and recordings.” (Brookes, 2005)

Henry Jenkins denotes a moment when the new mass media made possible by broadcasting quite naturally tapped the deep roots of American folk culture:

Initially, the emerging entertainment industry made its peace with folk practices, seeing the availability of grassroots singers and musicians as a potential talent pool, incorporating community sing-a-longs into film exhibition practices, and broadcasting amateur-hour talent competitions. The new industrialized arts required huge investments and thus demanded a mass audience. The commercial entertainment industry set standards of technical perfection and professional accomplishment few grassroots performers could match. The commercial industries developed powerful infrastructures that ensured that their messages reached everyone in America who wasn’t living under a rock. Increasingly, the commercial culture generated the stories, images, and sounds that mattered most to the public. (Jenkins, 2006)

We are now in a moment when grassroots production of cultural products reemerges as a realistic possibility for individuals and communities.  The cost of producing high-quality media (text, image, audio, video) has dropped to about the price of a laptop.  The cost of distributing that media content online, for those with access to an Internet connection, is close to zero.  The rapid growth in the numbers of people producing digital media for online distribution, and the numbers of people looking to experience it, testifies to the value we derive in producing media for purely personal reasons.  There may be no profit in this activity.  It is true that one person’s blog may never reach more than a few dozen other people.  But in the long tradition of folk culture, profit and reaching a mass audience were never the point.  We have seen examples of “one person’s blog” having a profound impact on other people, communities, and perhaps the outcome of a presidential election. (Eberhart, 2005)  But regardless of the reach of today’s “new media,” its impact and value can never be measured by Neilson or Arbitron ratings.  If we want to make media more useful for human and community purposes, we must not deceive ourselves into thinking the mass media model developed in the 20th century is the only valid model. 

We find ourselves, then, in transition between a “culture of mass media” where the technologies and cultural products are controlled by a handful of powerful corporate elites, to a time when almost anything goes.  “The story of American arts in the twenty-first century might be told in terms of the public reemergence of grassroots creativity,” says Jenkins, “as everyday people take advantage of new technologies that enable them to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content.”(Jenkins, 2006)  Predictably, this scares the bejesus out of corporate media elites, who jealously guard their assets under the guise of copyright and intellectual property law.  Never mind that almost all mass media assets are drawn from the same well as our centuries-old folk traditions.  The act of borrowing from the songs and stories of other cultures is as old as culture itself.  But in the current phase-transition, storytelling itself is a contested act.  Which leads to our second big bullet-point:

• Participatory culture is not new, it’s just that we’re no longer used to it.

Is it any great surprise that at a time when folk practices are in digital renaissance, many of the same “commercial” mass media stories, images, and sounds are being reclaimed and remade on YouTube, Boing Boing, Ourmedia.org, and blogs everywhere?  The content currency of the emerging online media commons highlights the power and cultural resonance of twentieth century mass media industries, but there is a fundamental difference: we are reclaiming our own voices, and making the stories our own.

From the perspective of an elite mass media corporation, this is bad enough.  Add to this the rapid shift from “watching television” in the linear sense to the increasing consumption of media “on demand,” which undermines just about everything sacred about mass media economics.  Market leaders can no longer rely on their traditional methods of reaching target demographics.  Especially in the coveted 18-to-26 age bracket, “consumers are increasingly relying on search, recommendations from friends, and blogs to surface content,” says PBS’s John Boland.  “To an increasing degree, consumers control the creation, distribution, and marketing of content.” (Borland, 2007)
But it this enough to satisfy those of us who self-identify as open content radicals?  In my view, technologies don’t determine how they are inevitably used.(Nardi & O’Day, 1999) The emergence of ubiquitous media doesn’t guarantee equal access to authorship and distribution. But the “network of networks” structure of the Internet provides the first realistic opportunity to disrupt the “one-to-many” media model that has so thoroughly consolidated control of media in the interests of political and economic elites in the 20th century.

So, another bullet-point:

• Media that can be mastered and managed by the individual will tend to empower the individual.

To the extent that we once bought into the idea of “Media with a capital M” as master of the market, ultimately what I’m suggesting is a redefinition of media.  It’s personal now.  It no longer does what it did in the fading broadcast era, and we have a chance to make it what it used to be: a communications channel between people for any purpose they imagine.

The Rise of Ubiquitous Folk Media

My station runs a community project called the Youth Media Workshop.  We train kids aged 12 to 18 how to capture and edit digital audio and video, how to do interviews and research, and how to tell stories.  In many cases they have amazing stories of their own, but they thought they didn’t have permission to tell them.  We try to disabuse them of that notion.  The results are often startling: kids headed for trouble turn into Honor Roll students, discover they have a voice, and begin dreaming about lives and careers they never thought they could imagine.  Storytelling has always held great power to stir the souls of listeners and tellers alike.  To see the transformations in these young students is to lose one’s cherished cynicism.

From this we have learned much about how participation in media can be encouraged and facilitated.  It will take great effort to overcome the habits of thought encouraged by the dynamics of the previous mass media era.  We must deliberately train and encourage our students (and ourselves) to be participants and creators of “folk media with a global reach.”  As media creators, we are no longer beaming knowledge (or commercial messages) down from on high, but acting as participants in a continuing conversation about knowledge and community. 

We are entering an era when the power to tell stories and make art is augmented by ubiquitous digital media, networked globally by the Internet.  This is not a trivial observation.  In his treatise on the innovators of personal computing, Howard Rheingold observes: “Less than a century after the invention of moveable type, the literate community in Europe had grown from a privileged minority to a substantial portion of the population.  People’s lives changed radically and rapidly, not because of printing machinery, but because of what that invention made it possible for people to know.” (Rheingold, 1985)  Networked digital media, connected by the Internet and fueled by a resurgence of personal creativity with great production tools, can do more than make it “possible for people to know.”  It can make it possible for them to speak, sing, draw, paint, and share their stories and vision with other people anywhere.  This is what I mean now by the word media, and it’s quickly becoming ubiquitous.

What does Ubiquitous Media have to do with Ubiquitous Knowledge?...or why EndNote is only a beginning

Many people in academia are familiar with software such as EndNote, which allows the user to store references to books, journals, and other media objects.  You can use the software to record metadata about these media objects (title, year, author, publisher, URL, etc.) in a variety of standard formats, and nonstandard information such as your own keywords and abstracts.  You can then easily search your collection based on any of this metadata and filter the results.  EndNote also facilitates the expression of your metadata in a growing number of standardized formats, such as the APA style of chapter notes used in this book. It can also export XML documents, which can then be transformed into any other text format and manipulated by other software for whatever purpose.  It can even create web pages to display a set of records, or your entire reference library if you chose. So what you have with EndNote is a tool for adding meaning to media, and for retrieving, expressing and sharing that meaning with other people. As a bonus, it also makes creating chapter notes a snap.

Libraries, journals, and collections managers are working furiously to facilitate ingestion of information about their content into EndNote.  There’s also an EndNote Web service where users can store individual collections online and access it from anywhere.  All this allows the user to cultivate a personal information ecology drawing from global information resources to create a private reference library…or more precisely, a private library of references.

At another point of the ubiquitous knowledge spectrum, we have social bookmark tools like del.icio.us which enable users to store URLs with annotations and keywords. Since the annotations and keywords are part of the networked “public record” in relation to that URL, they help other people find online content relevant to any particular interest or search.  Because user-generated keywords (“folksonomies”) aren’t participants in any kind of controlled vocabulary, they may at times add noise to the signal.  But it seems that the relevance curve increases with the number of people tagging a particular resource, and the value of folksonomy has become well-accepted among respectable information architects. (Morville & Rosenfeld, 2006)

Among other examples of information environments which “harness collective intelligence” (O’Reilly, 2005): Flickr, JotSpot, Google Video, Backpack, Digg, Ourmedia, and the poster child for The Web 2.0, Wikipedia.  Some of these sites are more or less commercial and proprietary (which could be a problem down the road if they are firewalled or go dark).  In large part, search engines index them all continuously.  But increasingly, rich media and knowledge resources are findable via the meanings and perspectives contributed by the people who use them.(Morville, 2005) These are examples of drawing from personal information ecologies and practices to create a global library of references.

When personal and global reference systems become fully interoperational, things could get interesting. In Rainbow’s End, computer scientist and novelist Vernor Vinge envisions a world in which access to all online knowledge is continuously available via wearable devices and ubiquitous computing. (Vinge, 2006)  We don’t have to sign up for Vinge’s concept of a technological singularity (Vinge, 1993) to notice that ubicomp and continuously-connected online multimedia devices are becoming commonplace.  So what does this mean for the idea and the reality of ubiquitous knowledge?  Or perhaps a more useful question is, as educators what can we do about it?

A Modest New Media Manifesto

• Learn about and participate in new media
• Teach how to participate, including technology, analytic, and narrative skills
• Use the emerging global information commons to research, write, create, tell stories, publish, share, archive, and preserve content and metadata
• Develop useful personal information ecologies and connect them with the global
• Use, teach about, and advocate for open standards and non-proprietary tools
• Keep access to the Internet as open and public as possible

Much more needs to be said about challenges to open access: intellectual property law, government and corporate censorship, and proprietary systems and formats. But we won’t muster the determination to address these challenges unless we can imagine and articulate a vision of what ubiquitous media could mean for human knowledge, culture, and commerce.

Those of us who grew up immersed in the broadcasting era, we’re cynical about changes in media.  We’ve seen changes: from AM radio to FM radio to television to Cable and Satellite TV and now to HDTV and digital broadcasting such as it is.  Despite changes in broadcast technology, the model has remained the same: people serving the interests of media.  This makes us inclined to be slightly too skeptical to fully appreciate the opportunities before us.  But we have to stop looking in the rear-view mirror and get busy.  This time it’s about media serving the interests of people. So here’s perhaps the most radical proposition of all: To access ubiquitous knowledge, share your own.

(From forthcoming book: Ubiquitous Learning, Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, editors, University of Illinois Press)

Further Reading

Two scholarly books stand in stark contrast as regards the state of media, yet somehow encapsulate my argument: Robert W. McChesney’s outstanding history of U.S. broadcasting Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy (McChesney, 1993), and Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture: Where Old Media and New Media Collide (Jenkins, 2006). Whereas McChesney’s view is that corporate dominance dooms media for purposes of community and democracy unless and until it is overthrown, Jenkins argues that corporate media is increasingly irrelevant, and is being expropriated by the peasants regardless of what the tsar wants. Jenkins gives a nod to McChesney in his book while not backing down in the slightest, and they are both all the more relevant for the dialectic. Others weighing in on the subject: Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams in Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Tapscott & Williams, 2006), the title of which is mostly self-explanatory but still a worthy read; Howard Rheingold in Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Rheingold, 2002), which waxes (perhaps a bit too) enthusiastic about spontaneous social organization via instant-access technology; Howard Rheingold again with Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (Rheingold, 1985), a brilliant book about brilliant people who somehow invented personal computers and network technology; David Weinberger in Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web (Weinberger, 2002) and in the marvelous, well, manifesto entitled The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual (Weinberger, Levine, Locke, & Searls, 2000); and speaking of manifestos how about McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto (Wark, 2004), which cries out to be hacked by more of us; and a book that saw lots of this new media stuff coming even before the web, Stewart Brand in The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (Brand, 1987); Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O’Day, who remind us in Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart (Nardi & O’Day, 1999) that nothing is inevitable about how we choose to use things, so why not make choices that serve our interests (and oh, by the way, what are they?); Richard Adler with a deep look at how the “media industry” is shaking in its boots about new media in Next-Generation Media: The Global Shift (Adler, 2007); and for a practical look at what to actually know and do to make knowledge “findable,” Peter Morville’s plucky little book Ambient Findability (Morville, 2005), which we should all find, along with Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (Morville & Rosenfeld, 2006) for those who want to get totally geeked.  When it comes to architecting ubiquitous knowledge, searchability is good but findability is even better…

Notes

Adler, R. P. (2007). Next-Generation Media: The Global Shift. Washington, DC: The Aspen Institute. (T. A. Institute o. Document Number)
Borland, J. (2007, April 12, 2007). Opportunities and Threats in the Changing Media Landscape. Paper presented at the PBS Tech Conference 2007, Las Vegas, NV.
Brand, S. (1987). The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT. New York: Viking.
Brighton, J., & Tynan, J. (2006). Open Source Broadcasting. from http://www.opensourcebroadcasting.org/
Brookes, T. (2005). Guitar: An American Life. New York: Grove Press.
Eberhart, D. (2005). How the Blogs Torpedoed Dan Rather. 2007, from http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/1/28/172943.shtml
Gomes, L. (2007, April 18, 2007). Suddenly, the Web is Giving Eggheads Something to Watch. The Wall Street Journal, p. B1,
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.
King, A. (2007). US Broadband Penetration Breaks 80% Among Active Internet Users. from http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0703/
McChesney, R. W. (1993). Telecommunications, Mass Media, & Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting. New York: Oxford University Press.
Morville, P. (2005). Ambient Findability. Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Morville, P., & Rosenfeld, L. (2006). Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Third Edition. Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Nardi, B. A., & O’Day, V. L. (1999). Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart. Cambridge: MIT Press.
News-Gazette, T. (2007, April 22, 2007). Filmmaker coming home for screening. Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, p. F4,
O’Reilly, T. (2005). What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. from http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
Rheingold, H. (1985). Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Rheingold, H. (2002). Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. New York: Perseus.
Robinson, J. (April 15, 2007). BBC to put one million hours of its past online. The Observer, from http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2057465,00.html
Scott-Heron, G. (1970). The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. from http://www.gilscottheron.com/lyrevol.html
Tapscott, D., & Williams, A. D. (2006). Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. New York: Penguin.
Vinge, V. (1993). TECHNOLOGICAL SINGULARITY. Paper presented at the VISION-21 Symposium. from http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/WER2.html
Vinge, V. (2006). Rainbow’s End: A Novel with One Foot in the Future. New York: Tor Books.
Wark, M. (2004). A Hacker Manifesto. New York: Harvard.
Weinberger, D. (2002). Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web. New Work: Perseus.
Weinberger, D., Levine, R., Locke, C., & Searls, D. (2000). The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual. New York: Perseus.
Wikipedia. (2007). Invention of radio. 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_radio

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