Social Network

The Virtual Revolution

The Virtual Revolution went through the history of the web. It explained how the ideas of the web started in San Francisco in the early 1960s. The idea came from hippie culture and values. They wanted free will to say what they wanted and believed in libertarianism, which means rejecting state control and rebelling. With the web their would be no ownership and a free flow of information at all times. This lead to the first email being born in 1965, this was due to something called the intranet which meant that cpmputers were able to connect to eachother locally, however computers from all over the world could not be connected to eachother. This was due to there being no common language until the HTML was created. Bill Gates microsoft company was created in 1965. This then lead to the first web community called the well which was creating in 1985 in San Fransisco. In 1991 on August 6th, Tim Bernes Lee released web software. The creator of the web created a social and cultural innovation by bringing people together, letting the population use it free of charge and by resisting authority. Today 25% of the world are using the web with a massive 35 million people in britain alone logging on to the web. Shawn Fanning was the creator of the very first music download website in 1999 encouraging people to illegally download music free of charge. Since then 95% of music is now downloaded illegally creating a £53 million loss in revenue from the free downloading of film, Tv and music.

The Five Big Ideas & Wikinomics

Wikinomics:
Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams published Wikinomics in 2006. Along with Chris Anderson's The Long Tail theory, thhis is the other 'big idea' about buisness and commerce in the online age. These two 'big ideas' are useful for us because they take us beyond the media text or the study of media products into the realm of economics.

The Five Big Ideas:
1. Peering - An example of Peering would be Spotify because you are able to share your playlists and music with other people online using web 2.0. This is good because people can access music quickly and for free. However, on the other hand this can be bad for big companies because people are not buying music as such anymore and artists are losing out on money.
2. Free Creativity - is a natural and positive outcome of the free market, so attempting to regulate and control online 'remix' creativity is like trying to hold back the tide. The happy medium is achieved by a service such as Creative Commons , which provides licences which protect IP while at the same time allowing others to remix material within limits.
3. The media is democratised by perring creativity and the we meida journalism produced by odinary people.
4. Web 2.0 makes thinking globally inevitable. The internet is the 'worlds biggest coffee house', a virtual space in which a new blog is a created every second. In this instantly global communication sphere, national and cultural boundaries are inevitably reduced.