Thomas Streeter

In this interdisciplinary study of the laws and policies associated with commercial radio and television, Thomas Streeter reverses the usual take on broadcasting and markets by showing that government regulation creates rather than intervenes in the market. Analyzing the processes by which commercial media are organized, Streeter asks how it is possible to take the practice of broadcasting—the reproduction of disembodied sounds and pictures for dissemination to vast unseen audiences—and constitute it as something that can be bought, owned, and sold. With an impressive command of broadcast history, as well as critical and cultural studies of the media, Streeter shows that liberal marketplace principles—ideas of individuality, property, public interest, and markets—have come into contradiction with themselves. Commercial broadcasting is dependent on government privileges, and Streeter provides a searching critique of the political choices of corporate liberalism that shape our landscape of cultural property and electronic intangibles.

A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States

Selling the Air

2012 Honorable Mention from the Association of Internet Researchers for their Annual Best Book Prize Outstanding Academic Title from 2011 by Choice Magazine This book about America's romance with computer communication looks at the internet, not as harbinger of the future or the next big thing, but as an expression of the times. Streeter demonstrates that our ideas about what connected computers are for have been in constant flux since their invention. In the 1950s they were imagined as the means for fighting nuclear wars, in the 1960s as systems for bringing mathematical certainty to the messy complexity of social life, in the 1970s as countercultural playgrounds, in the 1980s as an icon for what's good about free markets, in the 1990s as a new frontier to be conquered and, by the late 1990s, as the transcendence of markets in an anarchist open source utopia. The Net Effect teases out how culture has influenced the construction of the internet and how the structure of the internet has played a role in cultures of social and political thought. It argues that the internet's real and imagined anarchic qualities are not a product of the technology alone, but of the historical peculiarities of how it emerged and was embraced. Finding several different traditions at work in the development of the internet—most uniquely, romanticism—Streeter demonstrates how the creation of technology is shot through with profoundly cultural forces—with the deep weight of the remembered past, and the pressures of shared passions made articulate.

Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet

The Net Effect

Zephyr Teachout

Howard Dean's campaign for president changed the way in which campaigns are run today. With an unlikely collection of highly talented and motivated staffers drawn from a variety of backgrounds, the Dean campaign transformed the way in which money was raised and supporters galvanized by using the Internet. Surprisingly, many of the campaign staff members were neither computer whizzes nor practiced political operatives, even though that is how some of them are identified today. This book allows key individuals in the campaign the chance to tell their stories with an eye to documenting the Internet campaign revolution and providing lessons to future campaigns. Howard Dean's inspirational statement of what it took for his campaign to get as far as it did-"mousepads, shoe leather, and hope"-holds great wisdom for anyone campaigning today, especially the 2008 presidential candidates.

Lessons from the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics

Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope

This book about America's romance with computer communication looks at the internet, not as harbinger of the future or the next big thing, but as an expression of the times. Streeter demonstrates that our ideas about what connected computers are for have been in constant flux since their invention. In the 1950s they were imagined as the means for fighting nuclear wars, in the 1960s as systems for bringing mathematical certainty to the messy complexity of social life, in the 1970s as countercultural playgrounds, in the 1980s as an icon for what's good about free markets, in the 1990s as a new frontier to be conquered and, by the late 1990s, as the transcendence of markets in an anarchist open source utopia. The Net Effect teases out how culture has influenced the construction of the internet and how the structure of the internet has played a role in cultures of social and political thought. It argues that the internet's real and imagined anarchic qualities are not a product of the technology alone, but of the historical peculiarities of how it emerged and was embraced. Finding several different traditions at work in the development of the internet—most uniquely, romanticism—Streeter demonstrates how the creation of technology is shot through with profoundly cultural forces—with the deep weight of the remembered past, and the pressures of shared passions made articulate.

Thomas Streeter

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