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Week 4: Digital consumers
Successful technological innovations are technologies which have been adopted and have entered the daily lives of consumers. For a technology to be successful in the mass market, it must offer advantages to the ordinary consumer which are seen as worth paying the asking price. The consumer electronics and computing industries have managed to deliver innovations over a long period which offer real benefits at decreasing real costs. The most widely diffused consumer technologies, such as the telephone, the radio, the television and the VCR have managed to do this very effectively. But how far are interactive technologies, which demand an active pattern of use from the consumer, likely to reach a mass market? What real benefits to they offer consumers? What does the World Wide Web currently offer that might be of interest to mass television consumers (through innovations such as WebTV) and what might it offer in the future (when combined with, say, digital television channels)? Consumers have rejected many technologies (Compact Disc-Interactive; Digital Compact Cassette) but have embraced others with real enthusiasm (Audio CD).

In this seminar we will discuss what we can learn about the prospects for mass broadband multimedia from both the history of earlier consumer electronics products and contemporary case studies. Why did Prestel fail, and Minitel and the WWW succeed? Why has the Sony PlayStation been such a success? How far do producer strategies and common standards influence adoption, and how far is success due to meeting consumer needs? We also look at the use of the internet in the home.  What is the use value of the home page to individuals and why is the web camera a popular form? A central question is that of the blurring of the boundaries between consumption and production.

Core Readings
o Cawson, Alan. 'Compact Disc-based Interactive Multimedia', in A. Cawson, L. Haddon and I. Miles, The Shape of Things to Consume: Delivering Information Technology into the Home, Aldershot: Avebury, 1995 (full text on-line at http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/ssfd2/title.htm)
o Cawson, Alan. 'Innovation and Consumer Electronics' in M. Dodgson and R. Rothwell, (eds) The Handbook of Industrial Innovation, Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1994.
o Miles, Ian. Cawson, Alan and Haddon, Leslie 'The shape of things to consume' in Roger Silverstone and Eric Hirsch, eds., Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, London: Routledge, 1992.
o O'Riordan, Kate. 'Playing With Lara in Virtual Space' in Munt, S.R. (ed) Technospaces: Inside the New Media. London: Continuum, 2001.

Supplementary Reading

o Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication In The Late Nineteenth Century. New York: O.U.P. 1988.

Additional Web Resources

o Frank Beacham, series of articles around the theme of 'techno-realism' at http://www.beacham.com

o Web materials on digital TV at http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/ssfd2/digital_consumers. They concern whether digital TV/high definition TV is likely to succeed in the US - both sides of the argument are presented.

A Previous Case Study
One example of the innovation/take up relationship is that of a recent failure: Divx - a version of a current success DVD - which used a specially adapted DVD player to read encoded DVD discs which could be unlocked on payment. Search the Web to try to find out why Divx failed and DVD appears to have succeeded. You can start at http://www.unik.no/~robert/hifi/dvd/divx.html
look also at the case of Personal Video Recorders such as ReplayTV and TiVO.  Start with the article at http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2705775,00.html and follow some of the related links to collect material.

STUDENT SYNOPSES

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Publication Details
Page Created By: Kate O'Riordan
Email: k.s.o-riordan@sussex.ac.uk
Page Last Modified: Wednesday, 27-Nov-2002 10:10:54 GMT [an error occurred while processing this directive]